The Next Chapter
blog.aereo.com
blog.aereo.com
As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I've ever used.
Aereo "worked." It worked like magic.
First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo's software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.
Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo's Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that's incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.
I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn't a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.
When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.
Progress, halted.
A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.
Look: the valuable product here is the content. All the technology can do is get in the way. It's great Aereo's technology got in the way less than its competitors, but that still doesn't mean people found the technology itself valuable. The content is what matters. The content is what delights consumers.
Given that reality, I think it's absurd to say that regulations protecting the people who create the content, the product without which the whole downstream ecosystem of streaming services and content consumption devices are utterly irrelevant, it's absurd to say those regulations are antiquated.
As a consumer, I want to access that content in an efficient, functional manner. My tax dollars are paying for it. So, I bought an antenna. It couldn't pick up any stations in my apartment, and this is a very common problem in NYC. Even if it picked up stations, I'd have to buy a separate device to record shows so that I can watch them on my schedule.
With Aereo, I was renting an antenna. The company built capital-intensive, power-sucking data warehouses in every city in which it operated and filled them with antennae for every customer. Aereo provided me with a cloud-based antenna, no different than buying one from Best Buy or Amazon.
Only:
(a) the signal was clear and reliable, not fuzzy. My friend has a long coaxial cable connected to his television and he tapes a 12" x 12" antenna to his window. Kind of ridiculous.
(b) they included a cloud-based DVR that allowed me to watch what I want, when I want. They improved the relationship that I had with broadcast content.
Aereo was very clear about the fact that they built a solution that adhered to the law because everyone had an individual antenna. This solution was very expensive, but it worked and though it was described as a Rube Goldberg machine, it made sense.
And here's the ultimate rub for content companies: now I don't watch your content at all. I don't see your ads. I have someone else's cable password, and I watch things sporadically, but I don't discover new shows like you want me to.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873239815045781...
If the networks want to give up their bandwidth and let the government auction it off, fine. I just don't like this crap that they get the spectrum for free, and I can't rent an antennae of my choosing.
IMO, either we allow Aereo, or we make the networks pay for the spectrum, or we get rid of over the air and use it for cell data.
I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed.
I suspect if you set up a privately owned library and lent out bestsellers, that's exactly what would happen.
That said, it'd be a real kicker IMO if the government stepped in and started broadcasting everything on the public airwaves for free anywhere in the world over the Internet. If the broadcasters don't like that, tough, go broadcast on cable. Of course, this will never happen because corporatocracy...
and here: http://www.bookrenter.com/
The First Sale Doctrine would disagree with you.
[1] I think it's a waste of valuable spectrum on creaky inefficient technology, mind you, but it's the deal the government made.
The problem is Aereo got greedy and screwed up the marketing. Had their homepage always said, rent a streaming DVR for $10 a month, it wouldn't be a problem. Capturing content and streaming it over the internet is perfectly legal. TiVo does it. Cablevision does it. Slingbox does it.
Aereo should have acted like a hardware rental company until after the supreme court ruling.
Slingbox allows you to stream broadcast content without problems. Broadcasters are OK with that. So Aereo was basically renting out 1000s of little slingboxes; how's that a problem now?
The implication of the case seems to be that renting an antenna does not give you those rights in the same way buying one does, which is bizarre and kind of hard to rationalize.
Aereo was exactly like slingbox, except you leased the equipment rather than own it.
I don't see how they can legitimately claim that they are entitled to more money because it's all happening over the internet instead of in your living room, especially when they aren't lifting a finger to distribute over the internet themselves.
it is either a cable company, and gets the compulsory license, or it is not.
This was a Incorrect ruling by the courts, which is par for the courts, the Supreme Court gets it wrong more than it gets right
If you want a legal monpoly over your works, you should not be able to pick and choose which services can rebroadcast it.
If you offer your channel to comcast you should be required to offer to any other service for the same fee or substantially the same fee,
That should be the string that is attached for intellectual privilege,
The ability to control who uses something is exactly what a legal monopoly over it is.
Its like saying of personal property, "if you want a legal monopoly over your things, you shouldn't be able to pick and choose who can borrow them."
With property you have exclusive access over a physical item, with intellectual privilege the government is granting you the exclusive control over an idea, visual or audio representation of an idea, or some other non-physical concept.
for example Copyright does not apply to a DVD it applies to the visual idea's and representation of those idea that happened to be stored on a DVD
The government created this artificial privilege and enforces that with threats of violence.
It is in no way akin to property, nor does is have any analogous relationship to property.
There absolutely is such a thing as intellectual property.
> With property you have exclusive access over a physical item
With property, you have exclusive rights with regard to something, but the exclusive rights may not be specifically to "access", and it may not be in a "physical item". Intangible personal property (which includes intellectual property, but also lots of other property rights in nonphysical things -- like securities, rights to legal action, etc.) is hardly a new thing.
> The government created this artificial privilege
Property is artificial, man-made, exclusive privilege with regard to something -- all of it is created through government, and all of it is enforced with threats of violence.
> It is in no way akin to property
Even your own description is exactly like every form of property.
Provided you had internet, yes. Which a lot of people didn't. Over the air broadcasts - which Aereo were retransmitting - don't require any internet connection. In an emergency situation like Sandy a bunny-ears antenna is infinitely more useful than a bandwidth-chewing internet streaming service.
Have you ever tried using one? Given that you live less than a mile from where Aereo is receiving its signal, you might be surprised at the crystal clear, HD quality TV you can get without paying a company $7 a month. Aereo's biggest triumph was making free, over the air broadcasts look like their premium product.
Television on your television, you say?
That brightened up my day a bit.
Unfortunately, we're back on Cable. Luckily there was a cheap package for 12 months to get us back on. I'll likely be cancelling at the end of the time, though.
Unfortunately the Supreme Court squashed them, but they really could have changed the world had the ruling gone the other way. ABC, NBC, CBS, and all the other broadcast networks would have had to change their business model and adapt or slowly die like the Blockbusters of the world.
Despite the fact that it didn't work out, I respect teams like this with ambitious goals that put everything on the line without compromise. Kudos to the team and investors that supported Aereo.
The Blockbuster analogy is frankly insulting to people who built real technology for video delivery. Blockbuster went bankrupt because technology made their middle-man position obsolete. In contrast, there is nothing obsolete about making content. Even in the face of modern technology that makes content creation cheap, peoples' demand for high-quality studio content is higher than ever.
Tons of legal businesses are built upon the same concept, especially in media distribution.
I would love shorter terms and some form of FRAND compulsory licensing.
http://techzend.com/download-install-flappy-bird-iphone-ipad...
I want to understand you better. Can you clarify?
He is arguing the law should change, as it should. He advanced arguments, which you may dislike, for why it should. And you respond with, simply, "the law currently says this."
I think I mostly agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: this is broadcast television. It's already being given away for free. I could easily and legally build a kit to record this broadcast without a cable box/official dvr. I could also rewatch that stuff any time legally. In theory I could legally pay someone to do this for me, head over and pick up the DVDs/VHS tapes in person and rewatch them myself. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but up until this point it's all legal right?
But doing all this over the internet is suddenly illegal? (Or is it the point where I pay someone else to do it for me? Either way seems kind of arbitrary to me...)
I had one (eye-tv) with an antenna, my computer is essentially a DVR (You subscribe to a program guide too, which makes picking programs to record tivo easy). I don't use it anymore, the computer died and I pretty much stopped watching tv.
At the very least, if the court said Aereo was a cable company the other brances of government should have at least respected that and given them the license to be a cable company.
What else is going to made illegal when renting a cloud computer?
There are things that you can do personally and not as a business. Sometimes businesses try to thread this needle. It depends on many factors and luck whether they succeed.
Also, would you consider it equally illegal if I paid "Bill" 6 miles down the road to put up and antenna and stream the feed online for me (and only me) to view?
The model was even opt-in; only content that was already broadcast was available, and if any producer didn't want to be offered on Aereo, they could simply stop broadcasting!
So did cable television which, in the early days, was notorious for not paying for broadcast network programming they could get over the air.
That was solved by introducing a compulsory licensing scheme: any cable company could retransmit an over-the-air broadcast network, so long as they paid up.
Which also solved a massive logistical headache of each cable provider potentially having to negotiate a license with the parent network (for its programming) and each affiliate (for the local programming such as news or local sports), by creating a consolidated administered fund to collect and distribute the payments.
All Aereo really needs is enough money to buy itself a few members of Congress and get a similar scheme set up. That is the real, literal legal "hack".
This all goes back to the core of the argument though: Is Aereo a content provider or an equipment company?
Obviously SCOTUS disagreed with several lower courts and determined that we were infringing. But to paint it as a black and white issue strikes me as a gross oversimplification.
Just out of curiosity (I'm legitimately not trying to start an argument), do you think Cablevision* should have been overturned? If not, how do you reconcile the fact that their RS-DVR doesn't publicly perform, but Aereo did?
*I seem to recall seeing you comment on Aereo stuff a bunch in the past and knowing a fair bit about the case, so I assume you're familiar with the Cablevision decision. Apologies if I misremembered or assumed incorrectly.
As a thought experiment, assume I live in a building that gets spotty OTA reception on my antenna. However, there is an apartment for rent on the top floor, and I decide to rent it for the sole purpose for storing property. If I set up an antenna in that apartment, but do not live in the space, and run a long cable from the top floor to my apartment, am I in violation of the law? I do not own the apartment that the antenna resides in, and I do not physically live there.
If this is not illegal, does it become illegal when I cut the cord between the apartments and instead encode the signal and stream it to my laptop?
So, said a different way, does the legality depend on whether I live in the same physical space as the antenna, or the fact that I have digitized the content between my two rented spaces?
It would seem that the courts view a company such as SlingMedia as a hardware provider and Aereo like the landlord of my second rented apartment. However, I can't resolve at what point what I do with my rented space and equipment becomes illegal.
Can anyone explain?
That was one of the most frustrating things for me when the decision came out. Obviously we all understood that we might lose, but to have a decision handed down that was so completely devoid of any sort of definitive logic or reasoning was really, really demoralizing.
They effectively just said "You look like a cable company, and even though we accept that legally you are most certainly not a cable company, we still find that you publicly perform... because cable companies publicly perform".
American Broadcasting Companies argued that the equipment you were running was irrelevant and what mattered was the service you were selling (streaming unlicensed TV over the internet).
I don't think the latter point is unreasonable. And I don't think your company thought it was unreasonable either (except when trying to win court cases). When trying to market your product to customers this is what your website said(1):
"Watch Real, Live TV on the Internet. Finally. With Aereo you can now watch live broadcast television online. No cable required."
The customer doesn't care about what's going on in your datacenter. Why should SCOTUS?
1. http://web.archive.org/web/20130302160437/https://aereo.com/
That marketing tagline you pulled could just as easily have come from Sling (i.e. "Put an antenna in your house and hook it up to a Slingbox"). But nobody seems to think that would be a public performance.
By your logic, Aereo should have been legal if the website said "User-controlled, individually assigned remote antennas and DVRs in the cloud".
The way you market yourself has nothing to do with copyright law. You need to look at what's actually happening under the hood – not just base your decision on whatever the "user perception" is of the service.
I didn't say that Aereo was legal or not based on its marketing, I said that there was a common cause to both Aereo's lack of legality and the marketing the company chose to sell the product.
Aereo didn't have that.
I think that is more than enough to distinguish Aereo from the cablevision law. But the Supreme Court doesn't haven't to follow Cablevision. That wasn't a SCOTUS case. And other circuits had conflicting rulings.
Cablevision didn't have a license that allowed consumers to remotely record and play back shows. But the courts decided that the company didn't need a license, because it was the users rather than Cablevision who were performing in that instance, and thus it was considered a private performance.
But yeah, I'm fully aware that SCOTUS wasn't bound by the Second Circuit decision in Cablevision. I only brought it up as a thought experiment because I was interested in hearing rayiner's opinion on that.
I'm not sure how SCOTUS would come out if it had seen Cablevision, but I think there is clear room for differentiation.
I think you can say that time-shifting is not rebroadcast without allowing Aereo. Aereo went a step further and said well we'll rent you an antenna. That's really the part that didn't fly with SCOTUS.
At least that is how I'd argue it.
First the engineers run the company, then the marketers, then the finance people, then the lawyers. TV is being run by lawyers.
If you do not think that engineers can be creative then we disagree. And if you think that every writer, actor, director is creative, then we also disagree.
facebook look-alike audiences google data etc.
Not that I ever expect a court ruling to say anything close to this because lobbyists and money, just saying...
But here's the thing. They still have to do that
TV viewing is at an all-time low. Broadcast TV has a different business model than Cable, but viewings have been going down for both.
Aereo's was too much a bet for too small of a win. "Now you can watch open TV on the internet" Any broadcaster could decide to do this in house and it's done, no Aereo needed.
It doesn't matter if they are web apps or other apps. They are separate, and because of this, shitty.
Edit: Itunes for music was massively dominant because it has everything. Separate stores for every single music publisher would be ridiculous. The same goes for other media.
You could have watched the olympics and FIFA WorldCup in streaming (if you were in the country) but you'd likely have to use youtube, a custom flash player and silverlight :/
I don't know why any broadcaster doesn't make the same move, becoming the "Internet Superstation".
I'd argue Netflix beat them to the punch when it started creating original, acclaimed content. How many < 30 year olds don't regularly watch TV, but pay monthly for Netflix? I'm one.
Most sales people get kinda bent hearing this. Hearing some of the deals they throw at you is hilarious, "We'll throw in channel package XYZ for only an extra $15 a month more then your internet." "Why would I pay more for something I'm not going to use?" "Well you own a TV don't you?" "Yes and its connected to a computer."
> "Don't you own a TV?"
> "No, I don't. I own a 50 inch computer monitor. It's hooked to a Chromecast, Roku, and PlayStation. We don't own a 'TV' of any kind."
Kind of. Viewership numbers for individual networks and shows have been declining, but only because there is much more high-quality programming available to watch on cable. Used to be, networks like TBS, AMC, etc. only showed reruns of shows in syndication. Now they produce a significant amount of their own content, adding to the pool of high-quality shows. These shows draw viewers away from the historically "top" networks because TV entertainment is a fully mature /saturated market and thus zero-sum rules apply.
Also, while viewership numbers may look like they're declining overall, it's really because nobody can agree on the best way to measure viewership that is fragmented across the various title VI video services (live, DVR, on demand). People are undisputedly watching more video content than ever, and the vast majority of it comes from cable or broadcast. But it looks like viewership is declining because advertisers and broadcasters can't agree on a consistent measurement and ad sales methodology across the broadcast windows.
Interestingly, in the UK, many broadcasters already do this. I can watch any BBC, ITV, or Channel 4 channel live from their websites, so long as I have a TV license.
Curious.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICraveTV
- http://archive.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/1999/12/33093
- http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-237450.html
ICraveTV was less ambitious than Aereo as well, as it had no DVR functionality, and it still got taken into the courts until they gave up.
Aereo was an important part of my cord cutting strategy here in NYC.
I can still get a lot of content from Roku + Chromecast but can't get the nationally broadcast channels (antennas won't work for my apartment location). Seems so backwards to me.
I can't wait for an Aereo replacement if anyone knows of one.
Now, I'd love to hear about some kind of non-legal replacement. Like some kind of crowd-sourced antenna array that makes it difficult to target and shut down.
A $100 device that transcodes OTA signals and sends them to your tablet.
They're launching next month in the Bay Area.
Having squashed a single company they could deal with, the TV industry may end up having to contend with some sort of P2P TV rebroadcast.
I understand why the title changes sometimes seem mechanical, but in reality that is far from the case. Sample bias plays a huge role here, and rightly so, because titles and title edits shouldn't be the locus of attention. Unfortunately, though, when most of the data goes unnoticed, the remaining sliver of cases creates a misleading picture. I'm not sure what we can do about this.
Creation needs to be a struggle. Taking someone else thing and modifying it is an easy path to create something. It also damages the original creation. Software and Art are NOT the same thing. Because software industry has chosen a different path should not mandate everything do the same.
Taking the collection of Marvel comic's characters and Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and creating a movie would also be cool, but it damages the original. It also by-passes the true meaning of greatness; Original. We as a society have in the last few decades valued bullshit Art over copyright and originality. Why? because it is easy and gives a short amount of pleasure.
Great things to not need marketing. Tolkien does not need marketing. He and his family (example) should be compensated forever. there should be no termination to it and his family should profit from it forever.
We should never take away the rights of the people who create things. If is their choice to give openness to them.
Also, how does mixing and modifying things damage the original? The original is still there and you can appreciate it without worrying about stuff someone else has done with it. That is specially true in software that's what makes it such a great medium.
If we were to ban any derivative work you'd need to forget about pretty much any "art" done in the last 400 years (to say a number). As mentioned somewhere else Tolkien's work is not "original" in that case then, it's a mash-up of European mythology. What about music? most modern music relies on samples of other works (check this TED talk by Mark Ronson about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_ronson_how_sampling_transforme...). And TV/Film? Many movie/tv scripts are just a modern version of Shakespeare's works. Anything we do now is influenced by something someone has done before, that's called progress and if we block this with made up "laws" we are going to be very impoverished as a society.
No one can ever experience the original, because the context of everyone's experience has changed. Would your perception of Lord of the Rings be the same before and after reading Wheel of Time or Game of Thrones? Would it even be the same before and after the France-U.S.-Vietnam War? Would it have been the same if written before World War 2?
When a work is created, the intention of the artist is fixed, but as artwork, it is continuously shaped by the perceptions of its audience. Art holds a mirror up to life, and that evolves.
So experiencing the original is quite impossible now. People who did experience the original have already gone on to reshape the culture with their own works, and we cannot, for instance, un-see the Peter Jackson films based on the books.
There may be a weak argument to be made there in favor of copyrights, since a derivative work could be so much more popular than the original that people are no longer willing to pay enough to maintain it. But it isn't as though a book will spontaneously burn itself if someone writes an unauthorized sequel or translation. The worst that could possibly happen to it is that people stop making fresh copies and forget that it exists.
That's the real ruin for artwork--being thrown into the Lethe.
Our culture would be substantially reduced if we removed all copying.
> there should be no termination to it and his family should profit from it forever.
What purpose would that serve for society?
> We should never take away the rights of the people who create things. If is their choice to give openness to them.
We created those rights out of nothing to begin with. Without artificially created monopoly protections, these people would have no basis for preventing copying. People have the choice not to publish. Yet people willingly published before copyright too.
Those temporary rights were granted as a bargain: We give up the right to copy for some time, in return for hopefully gaining in the form of encouraging more creation of content. As it stands, it seems a lot of us believe that the bargain has been shifted too much in favour of content creators.
the creator should have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer the terms. It is his property.
If they want to be immortalized as a contributor to the common culture, they will have to relinquish control sooner or later.
Otherwise, your creation loses relevance and fades away. Extant copies deteriorate. Collectors lose interest. Your work moves from the paragraph body to the footnotes. Artwork requires a continuous investment of creative energy, otherwise it is replaced by the work of other artists. Museums keep works on display, and encourage patrons to enjoy them as frequently as they are able. Corporations produce series sequels and souvenir merchandise. Artists cross-license their work to creators that work in different media, such as book authors optioning movie rights to film studios.
Works in the public domain get remixed into more contemporary works. Characters like Captain Nemo, Dorothy Gale, and Alice (in Wonderland) will never die because anyone who cares to do so can refresh and update their image in the zeitgeist.
Take the Norse deity Thor. Would the typical person outside of the Germanic and Scandinavian countries know anything about him if he were not included in non-original stories and artworks, like jewelry, altar carvings, and the eddas? Would anyone care if Marvel did not adopt him into its comic pantheon? Will he enjoy being a woman as much as his adopted brother?
The common culture evolves continuously. The laws are in place to encourage participation by folks who would not otherwise be able to expend the effort without compensation. They are not there to wall everything off and put locked gates everywhere. At some point, we need to be able to remember our childhood without paying someone a licensing fee.
This doesn't make sense to me. You can allow people to consume your work but not replicate it or consume it for free. The philanthropic nature of the artist is different than his creative ability.
copyright contains ownership, control, consumption, usage. It should be for the creator to determine.
As such, copyright law established an artificial, temporary monopoly which from the outset it was acknowledged was separate from ownership.
And unlike property law, which is frequently (though not universally) seen as codifying "natural" rights to ownership and use, with copyright the bargain is explicit:
The copyright holder is granted restrictions on the rights that would otherwise be held by the public as an incentive to contribute to benefit society as a whole.
There is no inherent right for a creator of a work to expect society to limit the spread of information for their benefit. To grant copyright, society is limiting our freedom of expression to conjure out of thin air a commercial monopoly.
To argue that the bargain is fair is one thing, but confusing copyright with property is something else entirely.
> the creator should have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer the terms.
The creator does not have the sole right to set the terms of use and transfer under any jurisdiction today. If you argue for that, you argue for a regime so restrictive that we have never seen its like. What you are implying is even far stricter than what applies to actual property.
For example, almost all countries have some system of compulsory licensing. All countries I'm aware of have expiring copyright terms (moves to try to perpetually extend the stated duration notwithstanding). All have exceptions of certain types of copying.
All puts limits as to the extent which the creator of a work may limit (even contractually) usage, even in cases where the creator explicitly avoids selling copies and instead merely licenses or leases instances of the work. (E.g. very few jurisdictions would allow the creator of a work to limit use by race or gender).
It is up to society to set these restrictions because these rights only exist because of the intervention of society in the first place. If a creator does not accept the bargain with wider society, they are free to never release their work. We are not obliged to support rent seeking - the bargain must be balanced accordingly to make up for the self imposed restrictions on freedom of expression that it creates.
He is promoting a view of copyright that extends far past the rights granted by any extant copyright system, in a forum where a lot of us are very aware of how much of culture is constant remixing and borrowing, or outright "stealing" of past content that has only been possible because copyright law is not nearly as exclusionary as the property law principles he seems to believe should apply (and as I pointed out elsewhere, in his other comments he hints at support for a degree of control which does not even apply to any property law system in the world) .