Aereo Files For Bankruptcy 137
An anonymous reader writes: After losing its Supreme Court case in June and briefly attempting to transform itself into a cable company, Aereo is now filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their service worked by letting people stream over-the-air television to their internet-connected devices. The content industry pushed back, and though Aereo argued its way through several lower courts, they say, "The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo's technology, creating regulatory and legal uncertainty. And while our team has focused its energies on exploring every path forward available to us, without that clarity, the challenges have proven too difficult to overcome."
innovation thwarted (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hint to anyone out there planning to work with the cable/satellite/media companies: don't.
Stop trying to bring the dinosaurs into the new century, they prefer to die a slow and painful death. The more you try to support their cause, the longer it will take.
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but that's how I get my internet
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Yes to Internet, no to cable TV.
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Take the deal, and contribute the money you save to an organization that fights the monopolies. Mine goes to the ACLU.
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Good idea but I would think the EFF [eff.org] would be better for things like this.
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Not until RMS quits.
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I always wondered about that. Was it ever tested in court? How can two services be priced lower than either one of them? Financially it seems impossible to me that A+B costs less than either A or B alone. Surely there's a law somewhere that could be used against that.
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Also, that sounds like an argument about splitting those companies in two, telecommunication vs media companies.
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Split Comcast down the middle. Internet on one side. Cable TV on the other. Ma'Bell style.
Apply what ever laws for DSL to have dry loop DSL to Coax so that you have dry loop COAX.
Then you could have separate companies competing for your coax internet. Comcast wants to charge their prices? Fine. Some local startup (operating over the dry loop coax) could offer unlimited data. Maybe another offers a "Netflix" package since they have a local NetFlix mirror at their offices. They could pay any of the local fibe
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Apply what ever laws for DSL to have dry loop DSL to Coax so that you have dry loop COAX.
The problem with this idea is that a Dry Loop is an actual thing; it's a physical connection, and it's a good match for the technology. Your dry loop is a dedicated electrical circuit.
A cable distribution network works differently. There is no dedicated circuit from the cable company to each customer; everything connects back to a headend..
And it's a ginormous broadcast network.
There's no cable running bac
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Financially it seems impossible to me that A+B costs less than either A or B alone. Surely there's a law somewhere that could be used against that.
There is no law requiring prices to be proportional to costs. Why should there be?
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Normally, no there wouldn't be. The cable ISPs, however, own a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access, however. This means that there are different rules in play. You can't use your monopoly good/service to boost your non-monopoly good/service above its competitors.
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But, but, but... They did it with the internet. Doesn't that make everything legal?
No, it just means you can add "...on the internet." and get a patent on something that was otherwise old news.
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I would think this would run afoul of laws governing monopolies. Cable companies have - for the most part - a monopoly on wired broadband Internet access. Sure, there are some telecoms here and there, but that mostly brings those areas into duopoly. When it comes to television service, though, there is competition. Not just from people cutting the cord, but from people who go to satellite TV (Dish, DirectTV) over cable TV.
When the cable companies price Internet only over the cost of Internet + Cable TV,
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Well; providing just one of the services may be more complicated, as they need to install additional hardware to block the TV services they aren't providing, but possibly that will create additional costs when they want to move towards an all digital network and reclaim TV frequencies to be used for service A.
In other words.... blocking Service B and maintaining the block creates additional costs
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The theory is that if you pay for broadband, you are paying for your connection to the infrastructure. So that cost is sent to the "data" side of the house.
The incremental cost for the TV channels they provide you are probably $1.00 (at least their hard costs going to the broadcasters).
Whey they get the bonus is the "number of households" that they can now increase to the advertisers (when they sell ads, they sell them based on how many households they serve). Additionally, they usually get a large amoun
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no such law, comcast has been doing that with their "bundles' for years (yes I have basic one); they hope you'll upgrade number of channels or else buy some pay-per-view thing once in a while so they prefer you have the TV hookup.
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Never wanted to do it, but i gotta go where the $$$ is
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NY is not a cheap place to live, even out of the city
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But just because you work for them doesn't mean you have to use their services.
Right?
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grow up asshole, we all have to work, my skils are in networking, in the place i live time warner is the spot I can use my skills the best and do something I enjoy doing, taking care of networks.
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There's no free market in the USA, or anywhere, these days. Big Money gets what Big Money wants almost every time.
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Shot in the face?
Because it's bound to happen eventually. Someone's going to get pissed enough to go on a CEO-killing rampage. That's when the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan. Because once one crazy jackass gets on the news, all the rest of them will come out of the woodwork.
Then the government won't be able to hide the fact that they're working for the corporations and against the people.
The turtles were a myth. It's morons all the way down. And all the way up.
I have no love for either side in this
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The idiotic opiates are only going to keep the horde distracted for so long. We'll eventually reach some titration point and the simmering pot will boil over violently.
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Innovation? They were a CATV system who didn't want to pay their statutory licensing fees.
Re:innovation thwarted (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, after the case was remanded the copyright office said that while they were a CATV system they could not just pay the compulsory licensing fees for some reason, it was a bizarre Catch 22 situation where they were a cable system for purposes of public retransmission under copyright law, but not for licensing purposes. Frankly it struck me as yet more proof of how corrupt and dysfunctional the system is.
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No one pays the compulsory licensing fee anymore. It's all done by negotiation now. That's one of the changes Congress made in the last decade when they made licensing a viable alternative to must-carry.
Re:innovation thwarted (Score:5, Insightful)
> Innovation? They were a CATV system who didn't want to pay their statutory licensing fees.
No, not really. Not at all actually.
First they are nothing like a CATV system. That's just the lame ass "walks like a duck" nonsense from the Supremes. However, once declared a CATV system by a bunch of senile old luddites, they actually did try to pay their statutory licensing feeds.
Lesser judges wouldn't let them.
They were either a CATV system or not a CATV depending on the way the wind was blowing and the judge du jour and the will of the incumbent monopolies.
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Not when it's a thousand antennas for a thousand customers. There wasn't any signal aggregation with Aereo (such that I understood). Each customer had a singular and direct link with an antenna. No different than if the customer put it up there themselves.
Yes, they were trying to beat the system on a technicality, but frankly, they (Aereo) were technically correct. The best kind of correct.
I live in a city of 1 million+, but far enough awa
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They were taking OTA signals and retransmitting them across the internet for profit without paying the broadcaster a dime.
So, exactly like broadcast.
You don't see a problem with this?
Of course not - do you have a problem with broadcast? That's the very business model the broadcasters are in. Aereo was in the business of being an outsourced antenna provider - what problem could you possibly have with that?
If anything, Aereo was bringing them additional customers to watch their ads.
All this is is the broadc
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They were taking OTA signals and retransmitting them across the internet for profit without paying the broadcaster a dime.
I could do that myself legally (I do so all the time, recording over the air signals and replaying them later on other devices), so why couldn't I pay someone to put an antenna somewhere for me?
The key was they really did have one antenna per customer, so it was exactly that - an antenna rental.
So why do YOU see anything wrong with that?
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Here's what I don't like about the Aereo ruling. I like your setup, and I've got one much like it myself, so we both believe the total do-it-yourself approach is fine.
But what if I didn't already have it, and didn't even know how to do it. If you told me you could time shift without using Comcast, I would ask you how to do that. You could of course tell me how, right? What if you didn't want to tell me, except for a fee, is that OK? What if I just paid you a flat fee to buy the equipment, come to my hous
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But I disagree that what aereo did was rebroadcasting. If you think that crossing the street, and going into the cloud, is a rebroadcast, then you have a problem with every cloud service. If I upload a song to dropbox, then play it from the cloud, then by this definition it is a rebroadcast.
And I know the court tried to do a little "we know it when we see it" kind of thing in their opinion, I think that is the worst thing for innovation - they should have set a clear line about what part of aereo's techno
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If Aereo simply sent the received signal, unchanged, unaltered, and as-is to your device, chances are they wouldn't have ended up in court. What they actually did was reencode the signal and rebroadcast it to you. Entirely two different things.
And its also why your contrived example falls down. Because they didn't run a wire which carried the same signal, they altered the signal.
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As I understand it, the service required a separate antenna for every single subscriber. So it's not the same as selling access to anyone willing to pay - you can sell it once, to yourself, then you need to set up a whole new antenna and cable for the next guy.
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Thanks I didn't know that. But that makes the SCOTUS decision even more disappointing - they could have taken this opportunity to find that merely encoding and deencoding a signal in order to compress it to reduce bandwidth doesn't really change the signal for legal purposes.
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They were either a CATV system or not a CATV depending on the way the ... judge du jour
So: the judges weren't all consistent with each other throughout the legal system. I'd like to sue them over this but unfortunately I have no standing to do so, and even if I tried the courts wouldn't even begin to listen to me.
If only there were a company around that had a nonsensical judgement against them that could perhaps start working on this (... if only they weren't broke.)
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Innovation?
No ... Lesser judges wouldn't let them.
"There's nothing new under the sun."
--- Proverb
... "and it's our job to make sure it STAYS that way."
--- entrenched corporate interests.
"...unless we own or can completely control them."
--- entrenched corporate interest lawyers.
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Supremes: a bunch of senile old luddites. Lesser judges ... judge du jour
Now now, be very careful there or someone'll attempt to go all GitMo on your a$$.
Why? Because you might be telling the truth there. And then they'll escort and torture (sorry, "interview") you until you finally tell them exactly what they want to hear.
Understand? Not what you said -- or not even perhaps the truth as you know it -- but what they expect and want you to say; the truth that they want to hear.
And then they'll stop -- who continues to torture a person once they've finally told everything
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Yes, they were trying to beat the system on a technicality, but frankly, they (Aereo) were technically correct. The best kind of correct.
I live in a city of 1 million+, but far enough away from the digital OTA signals that I can't get many channels e
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If a cable company signed up its first customer - before getting a second customer - are they eligible for the Aereo loophole?
The fact is, it doesn't matter how many antennas they had. The fact that they were providing that antenna as a paid service is the part that makes it fit the interpretation of the law.
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What innovation? Retransmitting OTA signals may have been 'innovative' 50+ years ago when the cable industry was born. And when that happened laws were modified to accomodate that fairly. Now we have the but but but it's the INTERNET, those laws don't apply to US, we're INNOVATIVE crowd.
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Well, "on the internet" seems to be perfectly acceptable for lame patents, but those *benefit* the corporate overloads so I guess that's OK then...
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Once again, the industry giants managed to thwart innovation to maintain the status quo.
The only innovation here was a bit of high tech stage magic used to disguise the fact they were functioning as a community antenna --- CATV --- service.
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>innovation
They were streaming TV shows over the internet.
The innovation was the business/distribution model, not the technology.
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A pool of antennas, slightly larger than the number of peak subscribers; it was never 1:1 antenna:subscriber -- a minor point some people don't understand. [You may, of course.]
And, while they were selling it as the difference between them and CATV, the courts disagreed, because, they were obviously just rebroadcasting other people's content and collecting a fee in the middle.
Walks like a duck indeed.
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Was that year 2014? If not, it's largely moot.
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The cable companies did exactly this for years (with a single antenna) and paid nobody. So what was your point again?
Yes, but then the law was changed, and cable companies can no longer do this. Aereo therefore can't either. Or should we allow some companies to play by different rules because they weren't around in the "good ole days"?
So what was your point again?
(Note that I'm NOT in favor of our current system. But whatever crappy rules exist should apply equally to everyone.)
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A pool of antennas, slightly larger than the number of peak subscribers; it was never 1:1 antenna:subscriber -- a minor point some people don't understand.
THIS.
I see so many uninformed posters here stating that people were "renting" an antenna of their very own, which was solely allocated to them permanently. While Aereo tried to claim something like that, it was never true. This was not like any "lease" or "renting" in any normal sense -- the antennas were allocated dynamically and returned to the "pool" after they had streamed for a particular customer.
Basically, customers were paying for a service -- a dynamic allocation of whatever antenna happened
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> What is innovative about a CATV system? Welcome to the 1980s.
They did it in a manner that would allow for multiple competing services and did not depend on them owning a physical network monopoly.
THAT is actually a nice marginal improvement (aka an innovation).
One solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not feed their useless parisitism on our culture and public domain.
If you must be entertained, find alternative sources, from indie stuff all the way to pirating.
We must do this until their backs are broken.
They will fight.
There will be casualties.
We must not stop or compromise.
Internet without cable and groceries without music (Score:2)
Increasingly there is only one viable solution. Vote with your wallet. Period. No cable, no movies, no music. Nothing.
I don't see how that can be made to work for most people without something drastic like joining the Amish. For "no cable", how would people living outside the range of fiber or fast DSL get broadband Internet without cable? For "no music", how can you do your shopping if part of what you pay for the products that the store sells goes toward licensing the background music played over the speakers in the store's ceiling? And if even if you choose to write your own music instead, what can you do to make sure t
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So you go no cable, you're then paying 1 of the 2 telecoms.... That's "better"? They're all equally corrupt, and not even in meaningfully different ways.
As for music, you're fine, as long as you don't publicly perform nor distribute it. If you do wind up doing either, and there's a question of copying, pay the $0.01 cent per performance fee and you're good.
One solution (Score:3)
Well, from what I've seen, the content producers are about to feel a world of hurt. Having a son of my own, and watching what he and his friends do, one of the many things I've noticed about the up and coming next generation is that they don't watch TV AT ALL. Not a single minute. I guess the content producers will finally get what they deserve, but it will just take another 5-10 years before they feel the pain they have caused themselves.
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My kids watch TV, but they prefer to watch on demand content such as Netflix over scheduled TV. Very rarely do they watch live TV (unless it is being used as background noise while they play with something else).
Drama Queen. (Score:2)
Do not buy anything these companies offer. No cable, no movies, no music. Nothing. Do not feed their useless parisitism on our culture and public domain.
If you must be entertained, find alternative sources, from indie stuff all the way to pirating.
Disney has been taking significant risks with films with serious geek cred --- Wreak-It Ralph. Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Hero Six --- and has been handsomely rewarded in return.
The geek is defined by pop culture and his talk of boycott is hot air. ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com]
The paying customer gets programming like Sherlock and The Game of Thrones and a voice in future productions.
The pirate gets whatever crumbs he can sweep off the floor.
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If you must be entertained, find alternative sources, from indie stuff all the way to pirating.
Or - I know this will sound crazy - getting out and involved with your community instead of passively receiving 'entertainment' from the glowing screen.
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Changed the laws? No (Score:3)
The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws
The existing laws defined them as a cable company. They were not very smart to think otherwise. The laws may need to go away, but that was always the correct interpretation.
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> The existing laws defined them as a cable company. They were not very smart to think otherwise. The laws may need to go away, but that was always the correct interpretation.
The existing laws did no such thing. The existing laws did not even address them. Furthermore, they were going out of their way to conform to what legal precedents have been set.
The "legal theory" used by the Supreme Court in this case was a national embarrassment.
Sometimes, it doesn't matter so much if you do the "right thing" or t
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Well I lost all faith with the ACA ruling where it was ruled not a tax (used to decide standing) and then in a different part of the same ruling a tax (to determine if it was constitutional).
True. Precedents are a bigger problem than Presidents. They are just destroying the Constitution by trying to rewrite laws from the court bench. It's slippery slopes all around.
Re:Changed the laws? No (Score:4, Informative)
The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws
The existing laws defined them as a cable company. They were not very smart to think otherwise. The laws may need to go away, but that was always the correct interpretation.
That's incorrect... If they were defined as a cable company, they could pay compulsory royalties and carry the content legally. [slashdot.org] However, the District Court recently held that no, they are not a cable company, and have no ability to pay those royalties for a license.
So, in essence, you have the Supreme Court saying that they're not NOT a cable company, and the District Court saying that they're NOT a cable company. It leaves them in a position where they are neither a cable company nor NOT a cable company, and therefore can never carry broadcast content, regardless of whether they want to pay for it or not.
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OK - that's where it gets ridiculous. I agreed with the first ruling - but thought it would be better for everyone if the law were changed. But then I stopped following the story. If they're not being allowed to pay the royalties, then that's too silly for words.
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They wanted to be treated like a CATV (Community Antenna TeleVision) system, but that rule book was thrown away in the 1980s when cable networks showed up, then in the 1990s broadcast stations got money for retransmission rights. Aereo pretended like the stations didn't have a right to that money, and that was their fatal error.
What's with this separation of powers thing? (Score:2)
"The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo's technology..."
De-facto trampling of the separation of powers seems to be the order of the day. If I go into a bank with a weapon and tell a cashier I'm going to take money without declaring and announcing I'm committing a bank robbery, I'm still robbing the bank, right? Doing something informally or explicitly has the same effect. Maybe it should open up the possibility of an appeal.
From the President, to Congress, to the Supreme Court, nobody seems to be taking seriously the bit about defending and preserving the Con
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From the President, to Congress, to the Supreme Court, nobody seems to be taking seriously the bit about defending and preserving the Constitution.
Least of all the voters.
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The "They created a law!" cry is a loser's argument... SCotUS like all courts interpret law, and what they were saying was "You used an old law book!"... they used to let CATV grab signals off the air for free, but now the major stations demand compensation in both the form of cash and clearance of other channels.
It's hard to tell the difference between the rate for WNYW New York and Fox News Channel, they're all in one package that also includes FX (and its FXX and FXM spinoffs), Fox Sports 1, Fox Business
The real ripoff here (Score:2)
The Supreme Court decision was not put Aereo out of business; all it did was rule that in retransmitting broadcasts Aereo should be operating as a cable company. But when Aereo was not allowed to operate as a cable carrier as the SCOTUS directed, that's when we knew that a monopoly was in operation.
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Did Aereo try to negotiate contracts that allowed them to redistribute content? Otherwise they were not trying to operate as a cable company, they were trying to make money off someone else's product without paying for it.
They don't need to, and neither do cable companies. 17 USC 111 [cornell.edu] provides for compulsory copyright licensing for cable providers, with rates set by the government. Once SCOTUS said Aereo was a cable company, they should have been allowed to take advantage of those licenses. However, the District Court said that they're also NOT a cable company, leaving Aereo in a legal limbo where they can't carry the content, regardless of whether they pay for it or not.
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...a total royalty fee payable to copyright owners pursuant to paragraph (3) for the period covered by the statement...
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Actually, they were paying the same price for it that all of their customers combined would have paid for it. But the networks wanted more.
Aereo was always doomed... (Score:2)
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Yeah, but none of the links are of the straightforward introduction type [wikipedia.org]
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Aereo? Sounds like a chocolate bar.
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(See our ad in Atlanta Knitting magazine for full details.)
.
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Aeero was party to a crucial US Supreme Court case that was well-publicized in the mainstream media. Not our fault you live under a fucking rock, AC.
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Most people don't care about what happens in some distant offshore country like USA.
Trade agreements (Score:2)
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Most people don't care about what happens in some distant offshore country like USA.
Our terrible legislation has a tendency to later show up in other parts of the world.
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Uh.... the software wasn't the magic. Unless you plan on putting 1000 TV antennas on your roof and building a server farm in your living room, the software isn't going to be of much use.
But yes, Aereo is to be commended for something *truly* innovative and useful.