Aereo Suspends Service Over Weekend → Will Aereo pay fees to get up and running again?

Yep! And if AEREO had negotiated for those retransmission rights up front, your bill would probably be $25 a month instead of $12, and none of this would have happened. Of course there is the question how many people would still want AEREO then....

No, because you are not making a PROFIT off of that. If you and your cousin Vinnie downtown make a deal so you can put your slingbox and hook it up to his antenna, no one is going to care.

AEREO made PROFIT off of this whole idea. And that is where the problem lies: If you make profit of using OTA signals, you have to pay the retransmission rights, just like anyone else that takes the signal and delivers it to your living room.

Are you equating free OTA broadcasts to a public service? If yes, the major difference between the example you posted and the broadcasting companies is that they receive a free license to the spectrum that other companies pay billions of dollars for (wireless companies). So there is a big quid pro quo in that relationship. They get the spectrum for free, we get the broadcasts for free.

Up until the late 90s the broadcasters used must carry as it was more important to have the viewers than the retransmission fees. But with all of the media consolidation, their power grew in rrelation to the distributers and that has allowed them to extract what amounts to huge payments for the retransmissions. It's billions of dollars a year now.

"retransmission rights" is a tragedy that's a result the absurd amount of laws we have burdening society. I don't see where you should have to pay to retransmit something that's free. There's where I think the cable co's got screwed long ago.

Aereo made the effort by installing an antenna for each customer to make it legitimate. Even though that was a ridiculous waste of money, that's what they did to try and make it legal. It's a shame that a company would have to jump through hoops like that to stay legal, and even worse that they lost.

Not at all. The supermarket is the local television station. The cable company is a delivery service that negotiated a bad contract where they had to pay the store to resell the groceries. The store is now double-dipping because they're still charging for the groceries, and they're also getting paid for each customer that the delivery service delivers groceries to.

Do you guys even know what retransmission is and WHY it was created? The idea with original retrans was that they would take the national feed and inject local advertising to monetize on a local level, and the must carry was there to INCREASE local competition, not SNUFF it out because a cable operator w/ sat feeds could easily bypass the local provider.

The local TV stations would CHANGE advertising and add special programming (news, talk shows, etc) which ot the local station could pick up a syndication or chose to broadcast their own material. That is MUCH different that the Aereo proposition.

Aereo was NOT modifying the stream whatsoever, so the decision was tenuous at best. Essentially they were dedicating a stream and presenting that stream to the end user--a lease. Now I can see where this is definitely a gray area and intersects w/ digital copyrights but the SC decided that the gray area would swing in favor of the copyright holders. That is consistent with their treatment in the past so not really a surprise.

As most of the TV stations in the US are now owned by conglomerates (what they were trying to prevent) the ENTIRE reason for it existing in the first place is not valid anymore.

They should let Aereo compete w/ national or regional feeds and of course that would LOWER cost (actualy competition), but at the same time potentially bring in non-regional broadcasts. The user of course would determine if that makes sense or not... Aereo cannot compete w/ the current monopoly must carry system, because they cannot control cost or demand as they are still negotiated in secret.

So this is a BEST case scenario for copyright holders, and what this means is that everyone's cable bill will continue to skyrocket. Not sure of why consumers would be HAPPY about this unless you work for the industry or own the stock

Problem with your analogy is that most local broadcast stations gave up their "must carry" status with the FCC somewhere in the 90s, when they started charging cable companies for carriage. So "must carry" no longer applies, because with that they literary became like any other channel on your cable company's lineup, including taking the risk that they decided not to carry you anymore.

Nowadays, the local programming and local news are intertwined with the national programming, and a cable company can no longer carry the national feed anymore. Hell, a national feed doesn't even exist anymore like it did in the 70s, companies like DirecTV that don't pick up locals in certain markets, broadcast the NY and LA lineups to customers that are not in a market they have local presence in. (Which is less then 1% of their customers).

AEREO is pretty much the same as the local cable company, or the DirecTV local spot beams: They take the local signal, and distribute it accordingly. AEREO was smart on one thing: There are laws in place (or read: FCC rulings) that disallow the broadcasting of one state's stations into another state. E.g you can't broadcast NY's channels to LA cable customers, because the local NBC would be really pissed off they miss out on all the commercial income. DirecTV and Dish can only do that where there ARE no locals. So AEREO did not sell nationwide, e.g. in Los Angeles I could buy a New York channel package.

The game changed over the last 10-15 years. If AEREO had limited themselves to the few stations left that were still operating under the "must carry" rule, the broadcaster would not have a leg to stand on. But the broadcasters changed, and started charging.

If AEREO negotiates carriage, they can continue operating. But at a higher price.

P.S. the high cable prices are mostly driven by sports, not by the broadcast networks.

Yep, that is how it works.

That does not mean however, you can freely REDISTRIBUTE those signals.

DirecTV and Dish Networks offer local channels on their packages, so you get the local NBC, CBS, ABC, etc, etc on your television with the local ads and local news, yadayada.

How do they GET those signals though? In many cases they simply rent a building in that local market, put a big antenna up on the roof to receive the signals for that local market, and put a satellite dish right next to it, to transmit those signals to the satellite in orbit, which in turn spot-beams it back to the local market, and Joe the mountain man in the woods 50 miles away (but still in that media market) will get the signals on his DirecTV or Dish.

But the difference there with AEREO, is that DirecTV and Dish actually PAY to retransmit those rights, and SELL them to you. AEREO does SELL you the signals (albeit with a rent-a-tenna loophole workaround), but does NOT pay to redistribute.

So yes, a public service: They broadcast. You receive for free.

The problem is when a company comes in, and sits in between the reception of the signal, and the delivery of said signal to your home..... and starts charging you for it.

No, it is NOT advertiser funded television anymore. Sure, that is what it used to be when they operated under the FCC "must carry" ruling. Most broadcasters have stepped away from that, and have started charging cable companies (more or less like HBO, but on a lesser scale because advertising is still a big income factor) to carry their signal, and as such they lost their "must carry" status.

Broadcasting the signal OTA is a public service. The broadcasters get to use the digital frequency spectrum for free (unlike e.g. wireless companies who pay for the frequency spectrum) and in return they broadcast for free.

The problem is that a company is squeezing in between the broadcasting for free, and receiving for free, and has started charging money to re-transmit the free signals to customers. They can't do that. And if they do want to do that, they have to pay, just like cable or satellite companies.

If AEREO offered their services completely for FREE, simply because some rich billionaire felt for all those people that could not receive a proper signal from the local broadcast tower.... there may not have been a problem. After all, it's a free signal, and it gets to the end user completely free of charge.

The problem came in when AEREO started taking that free signal, and started lining their pockets and CHARGE for that free signal. That, in the end, is what it is all about.

What you say is true, but I would agree with elefante72, that the change of local broadcasters switching from must-carry to retransmission consent was driven by massive media consolidation.

Congress really needs to go back and update the law. It's almost 25 years old and things have changed drastically from when they created must-carry and retransmission consent. The law that placed cable tv under the Public Performance Right clause of the Copyright Act and overturned Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc. is almost 40 years old.

Right now there is a major imbalance because the company that owns the broadcaster can withhold a whole slew of channels and they use that as blackmail to keep raising the rates.

Outside of a change to the retransmission law, I still feel a successful solution would be to allow the following exception to the antitrust laws. All of the distribution companies can collude and form a single representative for carriage negotiations. The content companies would then no longer be able to hold their channels hostage and play the distribution companies against each other during a contract fight. Right now they have the contracts expire at different times to gain that leverage. It would also level the playing field for the smaller distributors who would now have larger negotiating clout.

Retransmission fees are a crock of S#*t, created by the government to satisfy the OTA broadcast industry whining in the early 90's. I am close to Seventy and can remember in the 50's when the hosts of the morning talk programs would take great pains to announce their programs were being broadcast by new TV stations or carried by a newly activated CATV systems. Station programmers used the CATV systems to deliver more eyeballs without asking the owners of the CATV systems to pay for the privilege of doing so.

Retransmission fees were cooked up by the government to allow local TV stations to recover advertising revenue lost when the value of OTA programming decreased when CATV systems began carrying programming delivered via satellite. CATV Subscribers now had a choice of programming delivered via Satellite, reducing the number of eyeballs watching the OTA programs.

Your entire analogy is greatly flawed.

So anybody that makes modifications for cars should be paying those same car companies as well correct? By your logic they are making a profit by using someone else product.

We can probably extend the stupidity of that logic to 95% of the companies in the world.

As a matter of fact, this website should be probably paying at least 10 different people/companies for the profit it generates based on their work/products.

In many other countries they have. In The Netherlands you can ONLY receive the public broadcaster (the equivalent of PBS) for free our of the air with an OTA antenna, the commercial stations (the equivalents of ABC, CBS, etc) are all encrypted, and you pay a monthly fee to receive them, and you get a little digital box to decrypt them.

In the UK they have solved it differently, you have to pay for a "Television License" which runs about 145 pounds (or roughly $200) a year, which then gives you the right to receive not only the public broadcaster (BBC) but also all the commercial broadcasters (Channel4, Channel5, all the ITV channels, and a bunch more) without encryption. Australia has a similar system, albeit less expensive I believe. This said, it is technically possible to receive the channels without paying for a TV license, but you would be breaking the law, and it is enforced in the UK.

The result of countries updating the laws on free OTA signals, has most often resulted in the commercial broadcast companies being allowed to encrypt their signals, and sell them accordingly.

The upside might be (as has happened in the Netherlands) that there are multiple companies that sprung up and started selling a completely over the air channel package, and are competing against each other in the market keeping the price at a low level. The downside may be that there is no free OTA, which may hit hard with lower incomes here in the US.

Right now in the U.S. (And Canada) we are in a pretty sweet situation, in that the airwaves are still free to receive television channels, as quite a few other countries have either started allowing commercial television stations to encrypt, or charge a yearly licensing fee to pay for the cost of the infrastructure. I'm afraid that if they start tempering with those laws and rules, it will shift to a more commercialized approach, where you may still receive local community stations, religious stations, and home shopping for free, but will have to rent a decryption box to decrypt the signals from ABC, NBC and the like.

First, there is a difference between CATV (Central Antenna) which was a system of a big OTA antenna on a roof, and then transmitted through cables to a complex or HOA of some sorts. It's not the same as commercial cable and satellite, which started sprouting up in the late 70s and 80s with cable specific TV stations. (Think MTV, CNN, the pioneers of cable TV).

Second, it was not cooked up by the government, but by the broadcast companies. THEY wanted to charge for re-transmission. The FCC simply allowed it, with the requirement they give up their "must carry" status if they do. The government didn't cook anything up here, it was all commercial companies.

The troll circle-jerk mutual admiration society is out in force today I see.

Actually it is, or more precisely "a series of tubes". It is true that sometimes those "tubes" get virtualized (sorry big word) into a wireless form, but for all in tents and porpoises this is the same as cabled transmission because it's using open radio waves rather than ones contained in a tube (coax is literally a tube but it's filled with stuff like foam or air or aluminum or copper clad aluminum or copper clad steel or just copper).

By your interpretation of the SCOTUS interpretation my television equipment is illegal because it converts pushed mpeg data into IP data through a "LONG CORD".

Actually it does if you have a television translator license. Now I'm not clear on the current status of those licenses being issued because actual television station licenses are on hold till the conversion to digital is complete which I believe is September of 2015.

You at confusing a Master Antenna System which normally serves one building with a Community Antenna Television System which serves a city or town. Until CATV systems began carrying alternate programming via satellite the broadcasters loved CATV. I say again that the OTA stations weaseled the government into allowing them to charge retransmission fees to the CATV industry, unless the CATV system followed the must carry rules.

I'm not familiar with The Netherlands system so I'll have to read up on that.

In the UK, that license fee has been there since the beginning of TV and only goes to the BBC. They didn't have a US based system and changed things later on. They decided from the start that the BBC would air commercial free broadcasts and be funded by the viewers. We decided there would be multiple broadcasters competing and they would be funded by commercial sponsors. They then got a sweet kickback in the 90s giving them 2 revenue streams for their broadcasts.

I can guarantee you that the broadcasters would never agree to go to a British model. They would not give up their ad revenue and they would never be able to agree on how the pot would be split between all of the broadcasters in the country.

No I don't think the British model is right either for the US because the BBC is such a different type of television and funded by the license fee. And you are right, ITV and Channel 4/5 are based on advertising and carriage transmission fees like in the U.S. They utilize the "freeview" system, which is similar to basic OTA in the U.S., but questions have arisen on whether that should not be commercialized as well, but it (of course) meets with resistance from the public.

All I am saying that if you do want to fight the law, it may not go in favor of the customer, but in favor of the broadcaster. It will all depend on how their bottom line will look like. If it will go down with whatever change is presented, they will fight it heavily.

They certainly have the money to buy the laws they want.

That's why I think the antitrust angle would be a better route as it would pit 2 large lobbies against eachother.

Right. I don't see the problem in that. You don't have to buy their service. And the signal is there for you to pluck out of the air anyway, so what's the problem with someone selling a service based on that. Again, the only reason the television stations care is that there is the potential for cable company revenue to decline, and so they've made this a retransmission issue.

This is the point in a nutshell. with this decision, the court has created a legal incongruity that can only be resolved by further court cases. There is no clear line between what is legal and what is illegal.

Here is why. Imagine the following situations:

Buying an antenna and putting it on your roof to receive free TV - LEGAL.

Buying an antenna and putting it on your neighbor's roof (with his permission) without paying him anything - probably legal?

You live behind a hill that block reception of TV signals. Your uphill neighbor own property all the way to the top of the hill and allows you to put an antenna on the peak to receive signals - probably legal?

Same situation as above except he charges you a monthly rental for the use of his property and the easement for your antenna cable - ?????

Same situation as above except the two of you put up one antenna and a splitter and share the signals - ?????

Same as above except that instead of your neighbor being next door, it's a friend or relative that lives at some distance away (maybe your mother or dad), but allows you to stream signals to your home over the internet, and doesn't charge you anything. In effect, a Slingbox or similar technology. LEGAL - for now, anyway.

But what if it's a friend and he feels like he needs you to pay something to cover the cost of the electricity your equipment will use? Legal?

Or maybe lt's a not-so-good friend or a distant cousin, who says that if he is going to let you put an antenna on his roof, he wants you to pay a flat $8 a month rental fee? Now we are looking a lot more like what Aereo was doing. But depending on what equipment you have at his home, a good chunk of that $8 may be doing no more than covering your fair share of his electric bill.

You can envision a lot of other scenarios in the area between the unquestionably legal antenna on your roof and what Aereo was doing, and the legality of all those situations are now clear as mud due to this stupid decision by the Supreme Court.

And then there is the question of whether in the back of their minds the reason they came down on Aereo was because it was a money-making corporation as opposed to a private arrangement between individuals. That would make sense BUT it would also conflict with their thinking in that wretched Citizens United decision, a.k.a. the decision that caused me to lose all respect for the Supreme Court.

Several people on various forums (maybe even this one, though if so I don't recall the thread) have suggested that what Aereo should do is sell the equipment they use to customers at stores like Best Buy or Walmart. In other words, you buy a small cube that contains one of Aereo's tiny antennas and the circuitry to support it, and it has a power jack and a network jack on the back, and if you want to and live within a mile or two of the transmitting towers you can put it in your attic and connect it to your local network and with the proper software, watch TV off of it, but if you want TV Guide data in the software you pay so much per month (similar to what Schedules Direct does, although I happen to think their rate is exorbitant). So Aereo makes a little money that way. But if you want to, you can ship or take your little cube device to an Aereo colocation center, where they will plug in your device (which remains your property) to power and the Internet for a small monthly fee. In effect you are only renting a small amount of shelf space, and paying for your power usage. Of course these colocation centers would be very close to the TV transmitters for a given locality, and just to be on the up and up they might also allow people to rent space for other types of servers (say Mac Minis to act as web servers or some such thing)

Server farms are a well established business and no court in its right mind would try to kill that, since it would put half the internet out of business. And changing for TV schedule data is a well-established business, a lot of people who use MythTV and similar software or PVR devices pay for schedule data (but they don't have to, but that's a whole other discussion). The courts would have a hard time killing that. And if a customer buys equipment that can receive TV signals and connect it to the Internet, well, that has been done before too. And PVR software is definitely legal as well.

I think Aereo could legitimately stay in business with three major modifications to their way of doing things. First, require the customer to purchase the equipment that actually receives the signals. No cable company does that. Second, require customers to pay for TV schedule data as a separate item, perhaps billed by an entirely separate company, and make it optional (if you don't buy it, you can still say "record channel 35 from 11:00 to 12:00"). No cable company does that, either. And finally, move the PVR functionality to a device in the customer's home. Think of something like a Simple TV, but with a remote antenna module that can be placed anywhere on the local network or on the Internet. You could say cable companies do that, since their power-sucking PVR box sits in the customer's home, but that's not something at all exclusive to cable or satellite boxes so you couldn't say that just doing that makes a company too similar to a cable company.

Actually I think the best combo would be something akin to a HDHomeRun Plus, which as I understand it has built-in trancoding/compression of received signals, but with a pair of Aereo's tiny antennas and the associated circuitry built in. That would be sent or taken to the colo center. Then in the same package, you get a device that's functionally equivalent to a SimpleTV box, except that it is paired with the aforementioned tuner/antenna device. You'd buy both of these together or separately, but you'd ship or take the tuner to the colo center and keep the other box (which would provide your tuner and PVR functionality) at home.

If Aereo sold this they could make their money from selling the equipment, offering the schedule service (or getting a commission if they partner with a schedule provider like Zap2It) which would go right to the user's at-home device, and in major cities, setting up colocation centers near transmitter towers (though admittedly, any company could do that, and it would probably be better for them if a lot of companies did - it makes a much harder target to hit). The thing is that by repackaging the service that way, they look NOTHING AT ALL like a cable company, and a lot like already well-established pieces of software and equipment that knowledgeable TV Viewers have been using for years.

I think the real key to this is that the end user has to outright own the equipment - the tiny antenna and associated tuner circuitry - and they have to be able to use it, even if only clumsily, totally independent of Aereo's services.

I'll make it easy on you:

If you are a commercially registered business, and you CHARGE people for a signal that can be received for FREE, then you should be paying retransmission rights.

If you put a slingbox at your cousins house because he has great antenna reception, and you slip him 5 bucks every so often to pay for the electricity costs, no one would ever find out. I'm of the opinion it is completely legal to do that. There are no commercial entities involved, there is no resale, no billing, no registered business.

You can come up with hundreds of examples, what about this, and how about if we do that, or what if we do it this way, is it still legal? In the end its a simple question: If money is exchanged hands from a person to a business to provide a signal, that business should pay the retransmission rights for that signal.

problem is they got the spectrum for free in exchange for OTA being free....then backstabbed everyone by creating a network of antenna's that suck ass and have no requirement of actually reaching the vast majority of the people.

so they have to provide it for free...but good luck getting it.

Yes the internet is just a long cord. I guess you dont know how it works.

Also, if they want to clearly defined it as a non shared link they can just have customer VPN into the Aereo intranet. Then that takes away any argument you can make about the internet.

Read the ruling. It does not actually make leasing an antenna, dvr, and software over the internet illegal.
The issue is the supreme court claimed that Aereo was doing more than just leasing equipment and was like a cable company (even though Aereo provides no content and does not retransmit, the customer just watches what they can pickup with their leased OTA antenna).

The ruling only applies to a company that "looks like a cable company". If you dont look like a cable company than the ruling does not apply.

You are then saying it is illegal to lease equipment. Pathetic.