Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued | Hacker News Reader

Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued

nytimes.com

123 pointspseudolus52 comments

“I ask people all the time, ‘Do you know you’re supposed to get television for free?’” Mr. Goodfriend said during an interview in Central Park, gesturing to a gaggle of visitors. “Most people under 50 don’t get it.”

It's really amazing how many people don't realize this. A friend of mine came over, saw I got a bunch of HD channels, and when I mentioned it was free her first assumption was that my $8 antenna was some sort of satellite hacking device.

I just explained this to my son yesterday, ending with a demo where I dug up an old coax antenna, connected it to the TV, and showed him channels of free content (also, what static looks like). He was amazed. (What else have I forgotten to tell him about? I've failed him as a father!)

He thought the over-the-air picture quality was better, which considering the bitrates he's used to with Netflix and YouTube, is probably true.

OTA picture quality varies. Each physical channel gets 20mbps of mpeg transport stream, almost always with mpeg2 video. If the physical channel has one or two streams, and a good multiplexer, the quality is pretty nice. If they're running 12 streams of video, it's going to be awful.

ATSC 3, if it's ever deployed, has a lot higher data rate and requires support for h.265 deciding, so it could be really high quality, or full of even more crappy substreams.

In my experience it's almost always better than cable, which has horrendous compression rates.

Facebook is free too you know.

Subjecting your brain to consumerism brainwashing is itself a cost.

At least with the HD antenna, nobody knows you're watching (with a dumb TV anyway... and with the microphones ripped out of every inter-connected electronic device you have).

It may be possible to passively detect what channel you are tuned to. I’ve read anecdotes of billboards scanning cars as they pass to determine what FM station they are tuned to, however I can not find a source.

Similarly, though, radar detector detectors definitely exist.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detector

I mean, distinguishing an attenuation related to receiving a signal from an attenuation from literally anything else seems a bit difficult, though I would imagine much simpler with radar.

The way to detect receivers is by detecting the characteristic radiation from the most common type of receiver circuit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver#Local...

It's how radar detector-detectors work. If they can tell if you have a radar receiver, I imagine turning a knob is all it takes to change it a FM radio detector.

Then only tune your TV to PBS, that way the rest of us will get to avoid having this tedious conversation yet again.

Hmmm, I take it has been a few years since you've visited PBS..

What’s up with PBS?

> Facebook is free too you know.

Only if you give away your privacy for free.

I don't know that this is an age thing so much as an income thing. It's anecdotal, but I'm 21, we weren't well to do growing up, and so the only way to get reliable TV for free was through the antenna.

How Locast differs from Aereo:

1. They place an antenna in the same market as the subscribers, and don't stream content from one market to a viewer in a different market

2. They're nonprofit, which I guess changes the rules on this type of activity?

I hope he does get sued, and wins. This seems to be analogous to time-shifting your content using a VCR (now DVR), except it's space-shifting your antenna instead.

> except it's space-shifting your antenna instead.

IIRC, Aereo had distinct aerials per customer (at-a-time -- they oversubscribed/multiplexed them).

> 2. They're nonprofit, which I guess changes the rules on this type of activity?

Not really in terms of the statutes AFAIK, but it likely does change the specifics of the debate ever-so-slightly.

The relevant legislation in the United States would be the Copyright Act of 1976.

Presumably the fair use doctrine is most pertinent aspect applied here and the first part of section 107 explains that: "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes."[1] would be considered in determining compliance with the applicable statues of the law.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

§ 107 doesn't seem to apply since it's clearly not educational. If the ads that they run to support the service offset the broadcaster's ads, they will be motivated to bring suit, so we'll probably find out quickly whether Locast's business model constitutes Fair Use or not.

Oh, I missed that detail. Locast is inserting ads? I could see that being a major point in a suit.

Do you have a source that supports that Locast is running ads?

Replying to myself: but 17 USC § 111.a.5 does apply and it's very specifically applies for "... other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service."

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/111

This is the statute Locast is relying on. “(5) the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service.”

Aereo obviously couldn’t take advantage of this since they were for profit.

You always had to be in the same market with Aereo, they validated by your credit card billing address.

We definitely did have our antennas in the same market (DMA) as our subscribers, and went to great lengths to prevent customers from streaming when outside of their home market, as we felt that approach best complied with existing law.

Thanks for the correction. I don’t know why I thought “I knew” that you had just the one facility.

No worries. When we first launched we were only in NYC, so for a while it was just one facility. But we kept adding them in each new market.

Former Aereo employee here. A couple things:

1. Getting sued actually isn't as fun as it sounds

2. I love this so much

Locast is trolling in the best possible sense of the word.

This would be unnecessary in the city I live in.

All commercial and public broadcasters already provide real-time internet streams of their channels in addition to catch-up libraries for missed programs.

The only exception being some live sporting events.

And it has always been completely free.

edit: They even established an industry wide group to develop and maintain a mobile app for all channels in the entire country. https://www.freeview.com.au/

That sounds great but that’s not just a different city, that’s a different country (Australia).

Yes, but all the relevant parameters are the same. Commercial and public broadcasters using airwaves to transmit content and advertisements to viewers.

Why would the broadcasters have a problem with this if it means potentially more people seeing their ads?

I guess I am just surprised that they don't do it themselves already.

Because in the US, people pay $12 a month via their cable companies to see those ads.

An indoor antenna won’t get you all the available channels in your region.

If you want to get 100% of the air signals in a 80 miles radius you need a large antenna placed on a high rise structure.

Unfortunately the picture quality on Freeview is generally terrible. Worse than even SD TV.

Still good that it exists though.

In the UK we also slightly confusingly, have Freeview although that's just standard OTA digital tv. Freeview Play provide on demand catchup although that's available on smart tvs etc via the internet anyway.

Don't think theres a centralised app though.

This is awesome, best of luck to them. I'm curious what kind of re-encoding they do though, and what the end-result bitrates are.

I would love to see a service like this that had a sensible API available so 3rd-party DVR software (MythTV, Kodi, Channels, etc) could integrate with it. And it would be even better if they provided access to the raw, untouched MPEG2 transport streams for optimal video/audio quality.

The location-based filtering is easily evaded. It doesn't check your IP address, just uses the HTML5 geolocation API, which is client-side. In Chrome, it's very easy to spoof your location. Open DevTools, click the three dots, click Sensors, input coordinates of a valid location (Lat: 40.7128, Long: -74.0060 works for me), hit enter, and reload. Chrome will then spoof the location to New York, and I have been able able to watch New York videos despite not being there.

If they get sued, this will be why. Other TV services go to much greater lengths to check location, with server-side geotracing and/or mandating use of mobile apps which access cellular/GPS location

Picture quality is pretty low, but the current generation of 'pirate' on-demand and archived streaming services mean I can, in a pinch, watch anything I want to. And in the case of archived material, without commercials. And if I use a sketchy paid app on my Android TV device, I can get things in HD.

I mention this not to promote piracy but to suggest that the 'Spotify-ication' of video seems enevitable. Netflix is great, but the new order is starting to carry the same baggage as cable: $15 for this, $19 for that, every month, until I feel economic pressure to install a VPN and find things for free. This is the same phenomenon that made the previous generation of pirate sources so popular.

I can throw a rock and hit Sutro Tower - San Francisco’s very omnipresent TV transmission antenna.

That being said, the convenience of watching broadcast TV for free on my iPad and not investing in hardware I have to manage for sure has me interested.

By the way you can also use Chromecast and cast it from your Android phone to your Chromecast enabled television. You can even start casting and open Firefox to write a comment like I just did.

So instead of connecting an antenna to your TV...?

Some TVs these days come without tuners. Internet only.

Just tried it in NYC: Mac/Safari couldn't determine my location for some reason and wouldn't play. The iOS app worked flawlessly. The quality is really nice.

Off to watch reruns of Hogan's Heroes...

Anybody in this crowd try this out yet? Sounds pretty cool. Would be awesome to tie it into a home DVR like a Homerun or Recast.

Both the app and the website are functional but sparse. The picture quality is quite good and I stream the content from my computer to my tv with no great loss in picture quality. On occasion I've had trouble using my Mac but the IOS app works flawlessly.

As others have mentioned, they appear to be using some kind of geolocation to ensure that viewers are only viewing content specific to their particular location. While the service is nominally free, commercials soliciting monthly and one-time donations to maintain the service are inserted frequently.

> While the service is nominally free, commercials soliciting monthly and one-time donations to maintain the service are inserted frequently.

Do these offset content or ads? If it's ads, it seems like it's definitely infringing and not likely to last. Even if it's content it probably still is.

When users load the app or launch the player from a web browser they receive a message explaining that the service is free and requesting a donation. I don't think that could be termed infringement. When I used the player in the web app, however, content would be interrupted with a similar type message mid-stream. That interruption could be problematic.

Roku and Android apps work great in the Philly area. Amazing for someone who is in a valley with poor reception ability when using an indoor antenna. I hope this service wins in the long run.

As far as I can see there's no real way to hook this into a DVR system, as it's all locked down to their apps. Maybe they can offer DVR services themselves? Not sure if that could cause some legal issues.

Can anyone give a summary of the privacy policy? They're getting my location... are they going to sell it?

It's here: https://www.locast.org/terms/

In short: No, unless they are acquired by someone else who chooses to.

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