A new broadcast TV delivery concept is challenged in the courts

[erazoner]

Aereo

It will not be easy for the judge in this case.

[SomeJoe7777 ACE - Geek]

It's indeed not an easy decision, but I look at it like this: It's truly not a public rebroadcast, because every person who subscribes to Aereo's service is renting individualized equipment (individual antenna, individual DVR, individual IP stream).

Since it's not a public rebroadcast, Aereo doesn't owe anything to the broadcasters in retransmission fees. Aereo is doing nothing more than renting thousands of Slingboxes to people. Furthermore, their entire revenue is based only on the rental of the equipment -- not the content.

The broadcasters are angry because 1) they're greedy. They already make money from selling the advertisements on their broadcasts (which Aereo transmits to the end customer completely intact), but they want that money PLUS the retransmission fees too. 2) In the past, renting antennas to people was impractical due to the size and complexity required to set up thousands of conventionally-sized antennas. But technology has advanced to the point where thousands of individual antennas are small and practical, so the broadcasters are just upset that technology has intruded upon their revenue model. This isn't at all unlike when the RIAA was caught with their pants down when the Internet made trading of music possible.

Again, this country was built on hard work, effort, and ingenuity, but companies don't want to do any of that anymore. They want to rest on their laurels and let the dough roll in without lifting a finger. All of a sudden when someone else wants to work hard and implement some ingenuity, the answer is not to compete but to sue and lobby the government for rules so that they don't have to compete.

How is that capitalism and not socialism? Look hard and you will always see the hypocritical attitude of those who always claim they want less government interference -- except when it suits their agenda, then they want more.

[hpmsrm]

Amen, S.J.   Amen.

[Computer-Joe]

Kind of like TV/internet service providers capping the internet service as a means to force you to buy their TV service instead of having unfettered access to internet based TV. Or a company that says it's service is the end all, be all, that everyone should have, and then stop the buildout because 60% coverage is more than enough to be a thorn in the side of their competition (and now there's wireless to work on). Talk about a short attention span. They gave up on DSL, they gave up on Uverse, they've definately given up on quality customer service, if they give up on wireless next, they've basically worked their way out of the industry altogether. Probably the only thing they won't give up on is POTS because that keeps them in posesion of the last mile.

I wouldn't mind government "interference", if it was not a government funded and/or led around by their noses by corporate America. Especially now that big business can dump astronomical piles of money into campaigns.

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I really want to become a procrastinator, but I keep putting it off.
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“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them." :Bertrand Russell

[SomeJoe7777 ACE - Geek]

Exactly my point, CJ.

Socialism is the state of a society where the government has taken over most management and production tasks in the country, has removed any freedom of choice from the people, and stagnates because there is no competition.  The society becomes inefficient and halts all forward progress because there is no motivation to do so.

If you replace the word "government" in that paragraph with "corporations", guess what?  It's still socialism.