"With high court ruling, Aereo suspends service; CEO says firm is assessing what steps to take next" by Emily Steel | New York Times June 29, 2014
NEW YORK — Aereo, the startup firm that threatened to upend the television industry, has hit the pause button.
Three days after the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and transmitting them to subscribers for a fee, the company suspended its service.
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In a 6-to-3 decision issued Wednesday, the Supreme Court sided with broadcasters in a case that was closely watched by the media and technology industries. The ruling comes as the foundation of the media business undergoes vast change reflecting a rush of new technologies and a rising number of consumers who are abandoning traditional pay-television subscriptions.
Aereo challenged the economics of the television business. Broadcasters worried that had the startup triumphed, it would have threatened the billions of dollars they received from cable and satellite companies in retransmission fees.
Related: Web Killing Cable
Broadcasters argued that Aereo’s business model violated copyright laws and was a high-tech way to steal their programs.
Aereo countered that its service was a digital-age solution for watching free over-the-air broadcasting.
The case was sent back to a lower court. Analysts said it would be nearly impossible for Aereo to continue with its current business model.
Before the decision, Aereo, which was founded in 2012, said that it had “no Plan B” if it lost in court.
But Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s chief executive, said in a letter to customers sent Saturday morning under the heading “Standing Together for Innovation, Progress and Technology,” [that] Aereo’s journey was “far from done.”
“The spectrum that the broadcasters use to transmit over-the-air programming belongs to the American public, and we believe you should have a right to access that live programming whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television or in the cloud,” Kanojia said in his letter to Aereo users.
Kanojia quoted Charles F. Kettering, an American engineer whose inventions were essential to the creation of the modern automobile: “The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.”
The rulers have fought for all history, yeah.
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"Aereo’s use of TV fare found to break copyright law" by Michael B. Farrell and Hiawatha Bray | Globe Staff June 25, 2014
The Internet streaming service Aereo is acting illegally when it retransmits television shows that its tiny antennas capture for free, the US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday — a major victory for broadcasters at a time when consumers are rapidly moving away from traditional TV viewing.
That's not progress, but it is progre$$.
By a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court found that Aereo, which was developed in Boston, violates US copyright law when it captures broadcast networks’ shows — without permission and without paying for them — and beams them to its customers’ computers and mobile devices for a fee.
The ruling, in addition to spelling a likely end to Aereo’s service, may stymie other innovative upstarts that are developing technologies to deliver television over the Web without the express approval of broadcasters and cable services, industry specialists said.
“After this decision, it’s very hard for me to see how anybody could set up a business offering that kind of service,” said Bruce Ewing, an intellectual property lawyer at Dorsey & Whitney in New York. “The networks are not going anywhere anytime soon, especially after this decision.”
Doesn't mean I have to watch them.
Aereo had couched its case as a technology upstart challenging an industry dinosaur with an innovative way to make watching TV viewing more convenient. But in its ruling, the high court agreed with the broadcast industry that the case was about a much simpler — and timeless — issue: the theft of intellectual property.
Of course, it is all allowed under taxpayer good will via corporate government approval when it comes to their $hit shows and the fees they are charged.
“Aereo characterized our lawsuit as an attack on innovation; that claim is demonstrably false,” said Gordon Smith, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, which launched the lawsuit that brought Aereo’s business before the Supreme Court.
The court’s ruling, Smith added, “sends an unmistakable message that businesses built on the theft of copyrighted material will not be tolerated.”
I paid for the paper I'm linking! Beyond that, we know it is a $upremely corporate court.
Next case!
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The ruling in favor of the broadcast companies comes at a period of tremendous flux for the entertainment industry....
WhoGivesaF!?!?
Mobile technology and on-demand services have liberated viewers from locking themselves down in front of the television set at a pre-programmed time, and consumers have so embraced the proliferation of streaming services that cable providers are rushing to provide them, too.
The Aereo case “is an opening salvo in a pretty intense war about the future of video,” said Nicco Mele, who lectures at the Harvard Kennedy School on Internet disruptions. “Consumers want to watch whatever they want to watch, whenever they want to watch it, and on whatever device they want to watch it on.”
For now, though, the Supreme Court has made a strong declaration that Aereo essentially functioned liked a cable TV provider and so is subject to the same copyright rules as those companies. Cable companies such as Comcast Corp. pay television networks fees to rebroadcast their programming.
Aereo was not paying retransmission fees. Its service erects arrays of tiny antennas that capture over-the-air broadcasts, high-tech rabbit ears that convert those signals for viewing on computers and mobile devices. Aereo said it merely provides equipment viewers use to watch shows that are already available on the public airwaves, so it does not qualify as a cable service for the purposes of copyright law.
The court was not buying that argument.
Writing for the majority, Justice Stephen Breyer said Congress amended the copyright law in 1976, when the cable industry was first taking root, to clarify that any service retransmitting television content must have permission from the show’s creators....
The three dissenters included the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurists, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia, who wrote in their opinion that Aereo is no different than a sort of high-tech copy shop or an Internet service provider.
“Internet service providers are a prime example,” Scalia wrote. “When one user sends data to another, the provider’s equipment facilitates the transfer automatically. Does that mean that the provider is directly liable when the transmission happens to result in the ‘reproduc[tion]’ of a copyrighted work? It does not.”
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Some industry specialists predict that even with Aereo out of the picture, the entertainment industry would have no choice but to innovative to keep up with consumers’ changing habits. Yet the court ruling makes it clear the future of streaming entertainment is in the hands of broadcasters and cable companies.
“You’re going to get more choice, but you’re going to have to pay for it,” said Michael Pachter, an entertainment industry analyst with Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.
He noted the recording industry lost billions after file-sharing services such as Napster made it easy to download music without paying for it. Now that cable and broadcast companies have beaten back Aereo’s challenge, it is it unlikely they will suffer the same fate as the music business, he said.
But because consumers will continue to demand easier access, Pachter said, the industry should create its own version of the Aereo — and charge to access it.
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Sorry I shut off my analysis, readers.
Also see:
After Supreme Court loss, Aereo as we know it may still have five months left
After Aereo, what’s next for Internet TV?
After Supreme Court ruling, Aereo’s rivals see opening
Broadcasters may seek damages from Aereo after Supreme Court ruling
They have to prop up their failing propaganda model in some way.
