NFL, MLB Warn That Aereo Could Trigger End of Free TV Game Broadcasts
variety.com
variety.com
That statement isn't even loaded, it's just wrong. What makes Aereo so interesting to me is that its premise is unbelievably simple. It's a regular old [ridiculously small] TV antenna, but instead of plugging it into your TV, it's plugged in a few dozen miles away and it connects to your computer over the internet.
When the leagues say that Aereo cuts into their retransmission fees from cable companies, what they're saying is "we want people to use cable tv, and making broadcast tv easier to use makes that less likely."
I don't agree with their position at all, but there is absolutely no reason to change their words or act like they're being indirect.
Aereo is causing a stink from the cable companies.
Cable companies have very little public good will.
Cable companies realize they can threaten NFL and MLB.
Cable companies lobby NFL and MLB to make statement.
NFL and MLB have enormous public good will.
NFL and MLB make statement. Public finally gets involved when the threat
of losing football games is announced.The NFL and MLB are just being used as a pawn by the networks to crank up the pressure.
I don't support their fight against Aereo but I do get where they're coming from. If Aereo do it for free, why can't the cable networks turn around and say "we're not paying you retransmission fees any more, we're just going to do what Aereo does"? That would mean the networks lose a lot of money, and they're not exactly profit machines as it is. Get ready for a lot more ads.
One person's "To skirt around" is another's "To comply with".
It's a total waste of time and money, but it's also legal.
But I do still get the root cause of what they're doing. And I don't particularly want my cable company to make even more money than they do already.
You're looking at this precisely how the NFL and MLB want you to look at it. The reality is that MLB and the NFL are congressionally-sanctioned monopolies that make a ton of money for the owners and players. Ever see an episode of MTV's Cribs?
The networks are "not exactly profit machines" as you say because the leagues are charging them so much. The networks in turn have to charge an arm and a leg to sports fans to make up for it. Sports fans are rebelling with both illegal and legal options like Aereo.
I don't know how things will play out but when you have a situation where a single person is making over $150,000 to play a single game of baseball, that's probably not a sustainable business model (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_sports_contract...).
The main difference with Aereo seems to be that every subscriber has their own antenna.
They don't want it to happen, that doesn't mean it can't be done.
This is a pretty loaded statement. As every legal objection so far has been struck down, and the streams are authorized by the Aereo user, it seems like disingenuous reporting to call the streams 'unauthorized'.
More to the point. If I recorded a game on my DVR, and the DVR streams it to another DVR in my house, that is not an unauthorized transmission, either.
Keep going NFL, eventually you'll piss off enough younger fans where you'll end up like the NHL.
I say this as a diehard football fan.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-08/news-corp-says-it-w...
A lot of broadcast TV business models are about to get (ugh, I'm so sorry; I hate to say this) disrupted.
EDIT: Edited to correct "Fox News" to "Fox" in general.
The only problem with Sunday Ticket is the restrictions that are there to protect the broadcast industry: local game blackouts, no Monday Night Football, etc. I say, good riddance to the broadcasters! Go all in on internet broadcasts and get rid of the restrictions. It's not like the major networks are going to actually drop NFL games. Call their bluff.
What does this imply? Aside from the lockouts, the NHL has secured long-term broadcasting deals in Canada and the US to fulfill the growth that it sees in the North American market. Clearly the NHL isn't anything close to the NFL from a financial standpoint, but implying the NHL is some bottom-feeder, profitless sports league isn't right.
These are people that have been buying NHL season tickets for their entire lives in what amounts to "hockey country".
We'll see how it affects certain teams but the NHL does have fallout from the lockout.
Torrents usually show up first thing Monday morning (US time), and are commercial free. So if you can stay off Facebook and refuse to answer your phone or check email (just in case) for long enough to download and watch the game, you don't need any of that hassle.
Or you could move to Europe and pay the NFL a hundred bucks a season for the same thing. (Probably not as good a dollar value as your other options, though, considering moving costs and all.)
ps. Don't tell me who won the Seahawks game!
Go Hawks.
This is my second year using NFL Game Pass. It’s excellent. And the cost of VPN + Game Pass subscription is less than cable.
Suffice to say that these dodgy streaming sites are often the easiest and most convenient way of watching a game.
The subreddits at /r/nfl /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball should all have links to streams if not on the sidebar then in the game threads. Other sports' subreddits probably do as well.
Good
Maybe it'll put an end to head-injury peddling, rape-festooned garbage pit that is American Football.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/10/14/2777431/maryville...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-13/head-injuries-make-...
The networks have seen the lower courts mostly rule in favor of Aereo, and are now pulling out all the stops to play the scare card by floating the possibility to the public of losing NFL games on Sundays.
I'm not sure what the exact legal details of the NFL's current broadcast agreement with CBS/FOX are, but I believe they currently receive upwards of $1bn a season from each network, extending out to 2021. Are they seriously just going to leave all of that on the table and take their chances with plummeting viewership and/or bank on the majority of fans purchasing some sort of season package?
Which makes my ex employers kick in the balls to the sky monopoly even more sweeter
To be fair, NFL Sunday Ticket is a really great subscription service if you want to follow out-of-market teams (I considered getting it this year to keep up with the Falcons now that I've moved to NYC, though in retrospect I'm glad I didn't). It's too bad that local games are subject to arcane blackout and broadcast restrictions.
Right now I have to hit Aereo for a good chunk of my team's blacked out games since I'm in a terrible spot for reception, thus I can't get it on my TV. They can still see me in their viewer metrics, and I am still adding value for their advertisers with Aereo. For the stuff I can't get on Aereo, I can sometimes find it on MLB.tv, but not always (depends on which network is the primary on the game and whether there are blackouts).
Sports broadcasting rights are a mess, and they're missing out on a lot of money by not doing something less stupid.
It's so surprising that people can't understand that the sports league aren't filled with idiots.
How does this impact them at all? If anything technology like this could tell them more about their audience then they could ever hope to know via traditional OTA broadcasts. But maybe that's the rub? They're scared that people will finally realize that not as many people are watching as they think?
The networks are the ones making extra revenue by forcing the cable companies to pay them to carry shows on their systems. The historical reasons for this are complex but I would refer you to a nice NPR podcast that explains it better:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/09/27/226891181/episode-...
So back to the problem at hand: Aereo has found a way to skip around those carriage fees that the networks demand. The courts have backed them up. So the real problem is that the cable companies are now asking "why should we pay if Aereo is not?"
It's not a cable-vs-OTA war, it's the networks-vs-everyone-else.
I was under the impression Aereo would rent you an antenna+DVR in any place, so you could watch programming from another state/country. As-is, I can't see what the fuss is about...
Also, The NFL and the NHL are registered as "tax free organizations", which means that those of us paying taxes have to pay more because these corporations are too greedy to give up a fair share of their (enormous) profits. This makes the hypocrisy of them crying about "free" broadcasts extremely irritating.
If you wanted to vouch for the reduction of sports on broadcast television with reasons related to health that are backed up with facts or citations, rather than speculative opining, you could have, and should have, done so.
It'd be comical if it wasn't depressing.
(Also, even if I was, don't we all unconsciously view things through the lens of our cultural upbringing? Fail to see how this could be either comical or depressing. Or perhaps you want opinions to be restricted to only people from your own culture?)
It's comical/depressing because nerd crowds are generally very self-congratulatory on how open-minded, liberal and intelligent they are.
And then this kind of reflexive antagonist behavior against jocks bubbles up, and we're forced to realize that no, just because geeks paint themselves as these smart and open-minded people does not mean it is true.
Sometimes, they're no better than bullies, insulting ways of life that they've never tried, simply because it is different or because they are expected by their group to dislike those things.
Go to any so-called sports bar. The majority of people are obese or overweight and look as if they'd be hard-pressed to run a hundred yards. Look at the majority of commercials during sports games broadcasts. They are typically Doritos, McDonalds, or something else related to fatty, unhealthy food. To go shopping in most places, you have to get your ass in a car since the bloody mall is like 20 miles away, and when you get there, the aisles are full of frozen pizza and cookies instead of fresh produce and meat.
Don't bother nitpicking my statement (it is obviously an exaggeration) -- just notice all these things about your "game Sunday" next time. But since you seem almost slavishly devoted to "omgsomeoneinanewspaperorscientificjournalsaiditsoitmustbetrue" sources, here are some.
1) Map of obesity rate in the US for all states from 1985-2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obesity_state_level_estima...
2) In 2012, the NFL generated $9.5 billion in revenue http://www.businessinsider.com/sports-chart-of-the-day-nfl-r.... Yet, it is registered as a non-profit organisation, which essentially means that all of us are indirectly subsidizing it as taxpayers. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/25/1241265/-Wait-the-N...
http://filipspagnoli.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/percent-of-...
I have a hard time believing that obesity is causally related to "college football" or televised sports in general. Except perhaps the fact that it's a sedentary activity, but a sizable chunk of HN probably spends far more time working in front of a computer.
Correlation is not causation, but it is correlation...i.e. things which will affect college football viewing might affect obesity as well. Ergo, if college football becomes too expensive to watch, maybe obesity rates will reduce. This is my hypothesis; only an actual experiment can show if this is true or not.
Go to any so-called tech conference. The majority of people are obese or overweight and look as if they'd be hard-pressed to run a hundred yards.
Stop being a douche.
The hypocrisy of an industry built, in large part, on the suppression of fair use rights through "technological chicanery" is amazing. I just threw up in my mouth a little.
Oh, right, it's because the major broadcast stations don't actually want people to watch their broadcast; they'd rather people buy cable, watch their programming there, and be paid by cable for the privilege. Plus the ad revenue.
A guide to laws surrounding cable retransmission: http://www.fcc.gov/guides/cable-carriage-broadcast-stations
And why do the sports leagues care? Kickbacks out of the same system. The article even says so: "The leagues collect about $100 million of the $300 million broadcasters receive from “compulsory” license fees paid by cable and satellite outlets, the brief stated". Plus the money the broadcasters keep is used to buy the sports content.
So: this is just another attempt to discourage cord-cutting and preserve the (huge) cable money stream. If people can actually watch the broadcasts (which, I'm convinced, only exist due to historical and political inertia), it's one less reason to have cable.
But why do we need trickery like Aereo to watch OTA programming? Some of it is convenience, but a large part is because the "digital TV" transition seems to have removed reliable reception for lots and lots of people. I'm 13 miles from a whole host of 1000MW towers, and can barely get a decent signal. That's just terrible. It ought to work fine 50 miles away. I'm not big on conspiracy theories, and it's probably just poor execution, but it sure is tempting to think that the digital broadcast transition was subtly sabotaged to push people to cable.
So good luck to Aereo. I don't think they're breaking any laws, just threatening an old business model. And that shouldn't be illegal. Sorry, entertainment industry (including the leagues): cable is gonna fade, whether you like it or not, so you better learn to deal with it. Deal with less money, lean more heavily on ads, or, even better: use the Internet! I'd pay the NFL directly for a decent streaming solution, but that'll never happen because it would tread on the toes of the networks. Maybe let the networks sell streaming directly? That would tread on the toes of the affiliates! Oh well. Figure something out.
It's a TV sport.
EDIT: local team
It's felt like the tide has been going against OTA broadcast of sports for a while now, and that 10%-20% is growing instead of shrinking, so this story is a bit disconcerting. :-/
And, like almost everyone else here, I'd be willing to fork over cash for NFL Sunday Ticket and/or MLB.tv if it weren't for the archaic blackout restrictions... grr...
If you're in a "Primary Market" for an NFL team the game should be on broadcast. I'm not sure if/how it works for NFLN games but ESPN usually simulcasts on ABC in primary markets.
In the parent's case, if they lived in Providence or Worcester or Portland, which are definitely Patriots markets, it wouldn't be on OTA :s
As far as I can tell, this fight seems to be between two ways to watch a sports game:
1. on over-the-air broadcast, which is free to receive. 2. cable television, which is not free to receive.
Apparently Aereo makes (1) easier, which presumably means more people will choose (1) instead of (2).
What I don't understand: * If I could watch the sports game for free, why would I ever choose to pay for it instead? * If they (I think in this fight 'they' refers to the NFL and MLB) don't want me to watch the sports game for free, then why do they allow/provide free broadcasts in the first place?
From what I can tell, the whole sports game watching market looks even more ludicrous than the arbitrary restrictions online TV/ebook market (the number of books in the kindle store that are available - then suddenly disappear when I log into my Australian amazon account - presumably publishers/authors love losing money).
Having regional broadcasts allows the sports leagues to essentially sell the games twice: once for the local network and once for the cable network (though I'm sure the actual licencing is more complex than that). Access to all of the games is a selling point for cable, particularly when your favorite team hails from a different region than the one you are currently living in (which is fairly common in the US, particularly since team attachment is often based on where someone grew up or which college they went to).
This setup makes sense for the leagues, since it was based on the limits of the original technology. Aereo removes the technical limits, and is threatening to remove the legal limits.
Because they currently have a way to monetize it: retransmission fees. If, however, Aereo becomes popular, the broadcasters claim this monetization model will be undermined; their response will be to stop doing over-the-air transmissions and instead directly license with premium content companies, such as ESPN.
What about NFL Sunday Ticket?
Maybe more consumers would buy access to games if they could buy them individually, so you'd end up with 4x the number of current Sunday Ticket subscribers buying at least 5 games a year. But that seems like a lot. Eventually you run out of sufficiently motivated out-of-market fans. Remember that the teams with big out-of-market fan bases are just the teams that get picked routinely for national coverage. I could easily see 6-8 Dallas Cowboys or Green Bay Packers games/year for free already.
But the reason why this isn't profitable for the NFL is the billion dollars per year that DirecTV pays them to be exclusive. There probably wouldn't be enough of an increase in viewership to cover that. The $300 DirecTV charges customers is actually selling it at a loss considering how much they pay the NFL. Their bet is that they can make up the difference in $60-$100 per month subscription fees.
However, market research demonstrated that there was strong consumer resistance for the concept of paying to watch one's "local" team, and the market for PPV out-of-market teams was not deemed large enough.
(to the cite-your-source pedants: there is a book that says these things, I read it once, but I do not guarantee that my recall is 100% accurate, nor do I remember title of said book.)
Maybe the broadcast networks need to implode sooner than later.
Visit
http://www.fccfees.com/query_all_2008.asp
And enter your local station callsign, it seems my local NBC affiliate in a top 30 market paid $23550 last year to the FCC. This is actually pretty extortionate for the FCC compared to my ham radio license which ends up being less than a buck a year. From memory marine radio licenses were like $5/yr?
Note that you need more than a broadcast license, many stations have microwave studio-xmtr links and maybe a mobile van or two it can all get complicated. Maybe its $16K for the big xmtr and everything else boosted it up to $23K.
So license fees are not being used as a centrally controlled market or whatever, it really pretty much only accounts for the costs of paper filing and professional evaluation of facilities WRT safety etc.
Auctioned off licenses for new stations can be quite expensive and that's a different problem.
An excellent way to make a small fortune is to start with a big fortune and then go into the broadcast industry. There's not much room for innovation or leadership, its pretty much all about financing. He who raises the cash the cheapest, wins.
This is a fed issue, as for municipals, the feds let them charge up to 5% of gross cable co revenue as a franchise fee, which is a separate issue.
As far as I know the state level usually doesn't get involved beyond tangential DNR wetlands protection type issues.
I think it inevitable that OTA broadcasting will end soon enough, except perhaps for PBS stations and religious broadcasters. The future of the TV bands looks a lot like the shortwave broadcaster bands today.
As people cut the cord and try to get back to watching television OTA, the broadcasters could just vacate their licenses and auction the spectrum off to mobile carriers. They win both ways: the windfall from the spectrum auction and the move of OTA viewers back to paid-retransmission carriers.
1: After not having TV for years, I'm drawn to any screen like a bug to light. I find it extremely difficult to focus on things if there's a screen in the background showing any sort of moving image. I notice people that do have TVs seem to be able to just leave them on as ambient audio/video.
Also, I'm not sure I've ever been to a bar or restaurant with a TV that was OTA only (without a cable or satellite hookup).
Which is fine. Either their new cable revenue will make up for the long term loss of public interest in these sports and the resulting loss in merchandise and advertising, or they'll slink back to broadcast.
But they don't have a right to make a living playing sports.
I don't see the problem, at least not this problem.
The NFL won't even show you live games in the US. You can watch them only after the broadcast. Also it took them forever to provide te All-22 stream where their only excuse was "we don't think fans should have this footage because they might criticize the coach"
The NBA website is just a mess to use and if im paying something like $250 a season for it I expect it to at least function properly.
And don't even get me started on stupid blackout rules. Ugh.
I hope sports goes away from basic tv though so they might also finally open up NFL online for the US (available for the rest of the world). Why make it painful to watch, why not take people's money that want it.
Step 1: Get declared legal
Step 2: Have cable companies stop paying retransmission fees or threaten to stop paying them.
Step 3: Cancel local broadcasting in response
Step 4: More subscribers for cable