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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I thought the Aereo decision was contrived, but I have to say: if you want to control distribution of your content, don't broadcast it unencrypted across the whole country.

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I think it's a pretty clear solution to the problem, honestly. Broadcasting is very clearly defined, and Aereo is very clearly unicasting.

If Aereo was using a single antenna and capturing the source to send to multiple clients, they'd be broadcasting:

    *===\
    *===A===S
    *===/

But instead, they're providing a 1:1 receive-and-transmit, basically turning them into a DVR with a really long cable:

    *===A===\
    *===A====S
    *===A===/

I think it was really the right ruling. The stations are upset that Aereo is capitalizing on their content, but what Aereo is selling is a DVR, not their content. They aren't broadcasting by any means.

It's a silly and wasteful answer to a silly problem.

Don't they have to because they use the public airwaves?

They could try using this instead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

The downside is that it's unlikely that all of the 50 million Americans that use an antenna for broadcast television can afford a computer and internet access. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and what content is on the public airwaves in five or ten years.

I think the problem there is not that those people will be unable to get their entertainment, but that they are being excluded from the Internet age. The solution is not to hold back the wheels of progress for the sake of their entertainment, it is to deploy Internet access in ways that are affordable and which are not locked down to any specific vendor. This is about more than television; people without Internet access are excluded from an increasing number of businesses, sources of education, and news (the non-entertainment kind).

I think they can offer this as an option, but not as the only option.

* Not everyone has high-speed internet to support high-def video * Not everyone has the latest and greatest internet-enabled TV * Sometimes you just want to turn something on and have it "Just work" instead of "Loading..."

Wow, that sounds really neat.

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