RIP, Aereo

[KSRBEvans]

Aereo is (or was, after today's ruling) a service that would essentially rent a small, dime-sized HD antenna and DVR to a subscriber for a monthly fee and allow the subscriber to watch over the air HD programming on the device of the consumer's choice. Aereo's argument was that it was just providing an easier way for people to do what they could already do for free. They got sued by the broadcasters, and today the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the broadcasters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/bu...challenge.html

It had rolled out in a few larger cities and I was hoping to be able to give it a shot eventually. Now it will probably go under. Too bad.

[Darrell KSR]

Question... What will this do for my favorite app, DroidTV? Looks the same to me.

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[Darrell KSR]

Located some "unofficial" responses from people who assist them. Not sure they rise to the level of employees. They claim that their business model is different, and they do not record over the air like Aereo does.

I think I may hold off on buying the "lifetime" subscription for a short time, just in case. My current quarterly subscription expires in September, surely by then--or by one renewal--they'll know if they will survive this ruling. Sure sounds similar to me, though.

[KSRBEvans]

This might be a better candidate for the Barber Shop forum, but I saw a tweet this morning that got me thinking. It said something like, "Aereo is the Uber of TV, and SCOTUS just made it illegal." Aereo and Uber are different companies that provide different services, of course, and the Aereo decision was based on copyright law--something Uber doesn't have anything to do with.

But they are both similar in that they are market responses to people's dissatisfaction with services provided by what are basically monopolies. There's not much competition in TV--it's the 2 satellite providers, maybe 1 cable company (if you're lucky enough to live in an area where there's a big enough population to have cable--my in-laws don't, for example), maybe Uverse if you live in a city that offers it. Taxis are licensed by the individual cities, and getting entrance to the marketplace is prohibitively expensive. You also start to see it in other areas, like hotel alternatives (Airbnb) and even a home restaurant movement.

So people really want alternatives, and Aereo and Uber are responses to that. And you get the entrenched interests--broadcasters, regulators, taxi operators, etc.--pushing back against it.

So you have innovation being stifled by the powers-that-be, and the courts left as the ultimate arbiter of that. Not sure that's the best way to go about the change in our society, which may sound weird for a lawyer to say. Guess it comes down to your philosophy of how much government/legal control there should be over the market and our daily lives.

[dan_bgblue]

Potential resurrection?

[KSRBEvans]

Yeah, I was listening to Leo Laporte after the decision and he said he thought they'd try to come back as a common carrier with a new monthly plan for their subscribers where they passed the retransmission fee on to their customers. Basically like cable/satellite. We'll have to see if they can make it work.

[Darrell KSR]

My droidTV app is apparently safe from this, since there is no live retransmission. With the ability to cast to my Roku wirelessly from my phone, I am anxious to give that a try.