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Fluffeh writes:
"Following up on our earlier story, the Justice Department has filed in the Supreme Court supporting Broadcasters in their case against Aereo the company that rents a small antenna for each customer, lets them record free to air TV, the streams it back to them anywhere.
The Justice Department argues that by doing so, they are allowing their customers to 'gain access to copyrighted content in the first instance, the same service that cable companies have traditionally provided.' but do so without paying broadcasters a license fee to do so. Aereo has argued that it isn't violating federal copyright laws and isn't threatening the future of the broadcast industry. Company executives have argued in public and in court filings that the service appeals to cord cutters and will help broadcasters keep those viewers."
(Score: 3, Informative) by evilviper on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:23PM
I fail to see why the Justice Department has a pony in this race... Aereo isn't going to increase white collar crime rates, or anything of the sort. I could see the FCC chiming-in, but not many others.
And now, a preemptive dump of info from my other comments:
DVRs:
Why would anyone ever bother with an expensive Tivo?
eMatic/iView/HomeWorx/ViewTV sell $30-60 "Digital converter boxes" with USB ports. Plug in a portable USB hard drive (most support up to 3TB) and you can record any TV shows you want in 1080i, time-shift the current program, watch any of the sub-channels on the channel you're recording, connect the drive to your computer and watch/edit/reencode them there, etc. Under $100 total for a 1TB HD DVR, with no monthly fees. ATSC has a built-in guide, anyhow, so why pay Tivo to give it to you in a roundabout way?
Cost:
At $8/month, you'd pay off even a high-end fringe (60mi) antenna system and cheap DVR (above) in 3 years. Slightly longer if you want to account for a few hours of installation time. Less time if you count the saving of switching your internet service to a lower-speed tier.
Antennas:
If you rent a house, or otherwise have any exclusive-use space (eg. in a single-story rental, you're free to stick an antenna on the roof, if you don't damage the building doing so). I've found that chimney-mount straps work quite well for holding an antenna mast to a roof-top central-air condenser unit... Alternatively, a tripod and some guy wires can do the job quite well.
If weather is affecting your reception, you've just got a crappy antenna system, wherever you've got it installed. Buy a nice 8-bay antenna like a Winegard 8800, and a mast-mount preamp like a Winegard LNA-200, and you'll probably see vastly different results.
Digital TV is great:
I had a number of analog stations that were so far gone you could BARELY tell, if you focused hard enough, that there was a discernible picture and sound buried under the wall of static. After the switchover, they finally became watchable, perfect picture 99% of the time.
What tricks most people into damming digital, is the fact that VHF-lo channels (2-6) were almost universally switched to UHF frequencies, and a few VHF-hi channels (7-13) did the same, too. If you are/were 60-100 miles away from the broadcast tower, or only had a VHF antenna, you'll suddenly find that 2-6 disappeared entirely, or are just hard to pick up. A VHF antenna will pick-up STRONG UHF signals, but NOT WELL. The answer, of course, is getting a good UHF antenna, and mounting it nice and high up a mast.
OTA reception is growing:
Younger people are MORE likely to use an OTA antenna than older people. Poor people are always disproportionately represented, but they're absolutely not the only group where OTA viewership is growing.
"The number of households relying on OTA reception only is also growing, [...] Growth is especially strong amongst younger households,"
"One in five young households never bothered to get a TV subscription to begin with."
"Also, 28 percent of all households with a head of household under the age of 35 use an antenna instead of a pay-TV subscription."
http://broadcastengineering.com/towersantenna/cord -cutters-turning-online-video-and-ota-antennas [broadcastengineering.com]
Laws:
Laws should be general enough that they don't ever need to be updated to suit the technology of the moment. Broadcasters are trying to say what Aereo is doing is wrong and bad, but frankly, if you can't describe the badness in black and white law, without either outlawing normal and reasonable individual behaviors (eg. neighbors sharing an antenna) or resorting to specific technicalities and intricacies of current technologies, then what you're trying to enshrine in law just doesn't belong there. Notice that the internet didn't change MURDER laws one damn bit.
I just murdered someone... but you can't arrest me, because it was in the cloud!
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 5, Informative) by compro01 on Wednesday March 05 2014, @02:30PM
Because this dude [wikipedia.org] is the Solicitor General.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:16PM
This is an issue for the content producers, Disney, etc, and not for the cable companies. The content producers successfully extorted the cable companies into paying for Network television, which is broadcast over the air for free. Aero is trying to legally evade those fees. The content providers, and their paid lawyers, Verrilli, included, are trying to stop this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Foobar Bazbot on Wednesday March 05 2014, @07:10PM
The cable companies don't like it either, though, because they're already stuck paying those fees, and an Aereo victory won't let them stop. So they'd much rather see Aereo (which offers a competing, though not equivalent, service) stuck with the same fees, else Aereo will have an advantage and take more of their customers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by evilviper on Wednesday March 05 2014, @09:16PM
No, cable companies can do the same thing as Aereo... The broadcast channels will just be delievered "OnDemand" like PPV / Movies / etc., instead of a normal channel on the dial.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:41PM
I fail to see why the Justice Department has a pony in this race...
It's simple: Obama and the Democrats are always on the side of the big media companies and the copyright cartel.
Asking why is like asking why the Republicans are always backing the oil companies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @04:16PM
Not ever? That would need lawmakers who essentially can foresee all possible cases, even those involving possibilities which are not there at the time of lawmaking.
For an easy example, consider a future world where relativistic speeds can be easily achieved. Now consider a thief who escapes with his highly relativistic ship. When he returns, on the earth more time has passed than the limitation period for theft. But for the thief himself, thanks to time dilatation, much less time has passed, especially less than the limitation period.
Now the legal question: Has the theft become time-barred or not?
I'm pretty sure that in that case the law would have to be amended to specify which time is relevant for the limitation period.
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Friday March 07 2014, @02:45PM
As I said in the first place: "what you're trying to enshrine in law just doesn't belong there. Notice that the internet didn't change MURDER laws one damn bit."
The statute of limitations only applies to the time the government can wait to file a criminal case. If it can proceed without the accused, then he'll be sentenced in abstentia, and when he returns, will be sent directly to jail to begin serving his sentence. If it can't proceed, then he will just be indicted, and the trial will be recessed until the accused returns to face the charges.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 07 2014, @05:32AM
A weak digital signal leads to freezing and pixellating which is annoying enough to be unwatchable. An analog signal might get snowy, but the video continues on and the audio continues on and the show is not constantly interupted.
(Score: 1) by evilviper on Friday March 07 2014, @02:50PM
This is completely wrong. A signal so weak that a digital tuner can't lock on it, will be indistinguishable from background static. It won't just be staticy, it'll be 99% white static snow. And when it's just strong enough that a digital tuner could make a PERFECT picture out of it, the analog signal would be black and white, rolling vertically/horizontally, sound like they're whispering in front of Niagra falls, etc.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.