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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating.

Clearly Aereo could sell antennas that people install. And they could also install those antennas. Presumably they could rent the antenna and the cable to them instead of selling it. So at what point does it cross the line into a service that is illegal? When they use a signal booster? When they convert it to a digital signal? When my neighbor signs up too and they use a common cable along the way?

I suspect the real problem is that the tech has just changed too much; at some point original intent stops making sense when the circumstances change enough. If we had a well-run legislative branch, presumably they would have noticed this problem a few years back and patched it. Or they would have delegated the problem to a regulator whose job it was to keep on top of things. But that's not the world we live in.

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Its an interesting theory. And frankly I hope the Supreme Court comes down solidly in Aereo's favor. The theory goes I can put an antenna on my roof and watch TV in the living room, I can put an antenna on top of an apartment building and watch TV down on a lower floor which doesn't have line of sight visibility. If I were rich I could put an antenna on a nearby mountaintop, run a line (with signal boosters and conditioners) all the way to my apartment in the city and watch that. So I should be able to do all of that but using the network cable between me and my antenna as the coax.

And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.

So far the courts have been somewhat irrational on the topic but as technical sophistication increases I keep hoping this house of cards will either collappse or be burned to the ground.

My guess is that the Supreme Court will be skeptical, because it looks too much like an attempt to get around streaming rules with a sham antenna that exists solely to get around streaming rules. I'm not that confident in that prediction, but I would be more surprised if they win than the reverse.

Another company that could in theory do something like that is Netflix. Currently they have streaming rights to a certain set of films, but they can rent you physical DVDs of a larger set of films. Could they eliminate that gap by setting up a "remote DVD viewing experience" service for the remainder? For the films where they have the streaming rights, they stream directly. For the films where they don't, they simply robo-insert the DVD into a player, hit play, and stream the output to you... which amounts to streaming video of the film, just with some robotic shuffling of DVDs to give it legal cover. My guess is this wouldn't fly either, but it's hard to say for sure.

There was a company that did remote DVD streaming, exactly in the fashion and with the intent you describe. They lost on court [1] with a $1.8m payout.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/10/streaming-movie-ser...

Interesting, I forgot about them. It looks like that case was never really resolved legally, though. They lost one injunction in a District Court, and then shut down, so the underlying issues weren't fully litigated (and not considered by higher courts).

No, they settled out-of-court and shut down after a preliminary injunction by a district court that effectively bankrupted them. There's no precedent there, and no hint of what the result of an appeal would have been.

there was an mp3 company in the 90s that did the same thing, but I doubt the RIAA actually was able to get a precedent.

And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.

Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is bullshit.

Of course it isn't free, but that's why there are ads on it.

Right. And the whole point is that the ads are targeted at a local audience.

Ok, and...

Does a viewer suddenly become "not local" if the signal gets to their house through the internet instead of an antenna?

The studios aren't concerned that someone will switch from an antenna to Aeveo, they're worried that someone will switch from cable to Aeveo. Even broadcast channels have been getting into the re-transmission fee game and they don't want to give it up. Frankly, I'm not worried that their business model is being disrupted.

The other issue is that ratings aren't well tracked for streams. This is more a problem that Nielson or someone similar needs to correct but it is a problem. And unless/until Aeveo viewers are counted in the ratings the broadcasters get no benefit from their existence.

The local targeting of ads is actually a minor point. Six minutes per hour of the ads you see are local ads, twelve minutes are national ads sold by the parent network. Also, Aero shows you the local affiliate stream so you're still seeing the local ads. At its core this case is about content rights.

Aereo will only let you sign up for its service if its antennas are located in the same market as your address.

This kind of misses the point that I can get broadcast for free by putting up an antenna at my house right now. I can do that at my neighbor's house or a piece of land down the road or even two states over. So... Again, at what point does this become not OK? This has been a real issue with broadcast spectrum for a while now (it shows up in other areas) and I'm glad Aero is challenging it to get a decision.

Yes, You can do it. But in Aereo's case you didn't, they did. They set up a small forest of individual antennas in a central location, then invited members of the public to lease them. It's top down, whereas what you are describing is bottom up.

If you had negotiated the right to hang a dime-size antenna of the Empire State building, with a home-brewed DVR accessible over the net, and then your friends and acquaintances had done the same thing, and eventually you had clubbed together and hired a janitor to keep an eye on the whole thing, so to speak, then it would have been a community thing that aggregated around a single point (a tall building where I imagine TV reception is good). Aereo is more of an astroturfing operation. It differs from your scenario in the same way that a housing subdivision built out by a developer differs from a village.

Most people pay technicians or contractors to install antennas. Hell, some people pay for remote antennas in the mountains. I fail to see the difference.

Boo hoo. If broadcasters don't like the rules, they should go cable-only and give the public back its spectrum, so that it can be put to a use that best serves the public.

Technical sophistication has nothing to do with this. Aereo's technology isn't complicated, or innovative, in a way courts have trouble understanding. It's a fairly low-tech workaround for rules that draw an otherwise easy to understand line between over the air broadcasts and streaming. The argument Aereo is making isn't a technical one, it's a nitpicky lawyer-ly loophole-y one. It's clearly a streaming service, but because there's a physical antenna involved, it shouldn't be subject to the same rules as other streaming services?

Ray its more sophistication with the meaning of the technology as it applies to the law versus the law itself. The Google v Oracle trial gave us some good examples of what 'understanding' looks like in the judiciary, specifically in understanding that you have to use the same name for a Java method if you want to be "compatible" (widely protected as fair use) even though the words/characters are identical which looks like written text.

By this logic, nobody will be able to make money by licensing the public spectrum and using it to deliver ad-supported content. Anyone with an antenna farm like Aereo will be able to capture, store and redistribute those feeds -- and why not modify them to skip commercials too? Anyone with a device containing 300M antennas can claim to be able to intermediate service for all Americans.

This is not, in and of itself, a reason why Aereo is wrong in this case. Plus, I think it's pretty clear that free OTA's days are numbered anyway. But Aereo would, I think, be attempting here to kill its host.

I'm not following. It seems to me that Aereo increases the reach of broadcasters, so their ability to deliver ad-supported content appears not just unharmed, but improved. Their inclusion of Tivo-ish features is no worse than actual Tivos, which are still legal.

> This is not, in and of itself, a reason why Aereo is wrong in this case. Plus, I think it's pretty clear that free OTA's days are numbered anyway. But Aereo would, I think, be attempting here to kill its host.

I'm not going to cry too hard about that. Ad-supported content can move to IP, and we can stop wasting all that spectrum for broadcast and move it to mobile data services, which are willing to pay much more for that valuable spectrum.

Disclaimer: I (sort of) work in the broadcast industry, but on the Internet/IP side of the house.

I agree with this 100%

I the current age it makes much more sense to do away with broadcast television/radio services and reclaim the spectrum for wireless data services. You can still have 'broadcast' stations over data connections if you like. It's the same logic I would apply to 'channels' on cable and voice traffic on cellular. All of these things can be done more efficiently, data wise, by replacing them with data connections and on-demand usage.

I also find the classification problem fascinating. Of course, the real technicality isn't explicit in the text of the relevant law. The real technicality is that the law is meant to please content creators/distributors. If Aereo does something they don't like, they're going to fight it, even if we spectators think that Aereo is technically following the text of the law.

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