
TV monitoring service is fair use, judge rules - sehrope
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/tv-monitoring-service-is-fair-use-judge-rules/
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fivedogit
I built and ran a broadcast monitoring business for 5 years from 2003 to 2007,
competing with services such as TVEyes and Critical Mention. It was called
RooseveltMedia.com. At peak, it recorded and catalogued about 400+ shows per
day in 15 media markets and had about 75 customers.

As we grew, I knew we needed to expand nationwide (which would require raising
VC). My saying was "We need Johnson and Johnson, not Congressman Johnson's
office." but this question of legality loomed very large. Legal or illegal? If
illegal, no investor in his right mind would give us money. Unfortunately, the
evidence I had at the time pointed towards "illegal" rather than "legal":

1\. There were lots of lawsuits. This Fox vs. TVEyes is not the first. We
definitely tiptoed around TV groups so as not to draw attention.

2\. The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM, a group of
regional services and some single-market self-employed folks) spent several
hundred thousand dollars to try to get the law rewritten so that royalties
would be set in stone, much like jukeboxes. Why would they do this if they
didn't all also believe it was illegal? In any case, the effort failed.

With this evidence in hand, I tried to grow the company organically, but it
became untenable. We weren't getting enough money from the single-market (or
few-market) customers to fund the expansion. By contrast, Critical Mention was
self-funded by a dot-commer, and completely ate our lunch. Even if we'd
attempted to raise money, the fundraising sidetrack would have set us back by
a few more miles and I had zero additional bandwidth. There really wasn't a
good answer to the question.

Ultimately, despite finding product-market fit almost immediately with this
freshman business effort, I decided to pivot into a more "legitimate"
business. I altered the tech to provide archiving systems for TV stations...
and it went over like a lead balloon, cratering the businesses and leaving me
with a pile of personal debt which took a couple of years of "real world" work
to pay off.

Since then I've tried to start 2 more companies (huzon.tv and
words4chrome.com) and while my execution and engineering skills have become
vastly better, neither found product-market fit like the first. Beginner's
luck, I guess.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Sounds familiar, did you colo in Pennsauken, NJ by any chance?

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aristus
I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the
fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks.
This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable
drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a
pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.

~~~
phantom784
I've heard a similar setup is similar in hotels. The hotel gets a box per
channel, re-broadcasts them onto coax (same as VCRs used to put eveything on
channel 3, but with more channels), and then the hotel TVs can use their
built-in tuners.

~~~
DrewRWx
It's even moving past that: the last hotel I was at used the TV as a thin
client that transmitted incoming IR signals back to its box in the server
room.

Needless to say, the latency was atrocious. I even saw a Windows desktop
flicker during a channel change.

~~~
ChiperSoft
So that's why hotel TVs always take so long to change channels. I thought they
were just really cheaply made tuners.

It's infuriating when you just want to channel surf before bed and ever button
press takes 5 seconds to register.

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toxican
>The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House, 100
members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news
organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press.

Yeah I don't think they were ever in any real danger. This isn't something
average joe consumers like us use, this is something big corps, media
companies, and politicians use.

~~~
golemotron
The trick with all disruptive businesses is to generate broad consensus of
value early, making adverse judicial decisions unlikely.

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jawns
On the one hand ... TVEyes sounds like a great, useful service.

On the other hand, once all of the legal challenges are out of the way, I
can't imagine there won't be a bunch of other companies swooping in to
undercut them. $500/month for a service like this? I'm thinking that has the
potential to go down significantly and quickly, with competition.

For instance, I can imagine a cut-rate service that doesn't do speech-to-text
but instead relies solely on closed captioning. Or a plan that monitors only a
limited subset of channels. It might not have all the features of TVEyes, but
may have enough to hurt TVEyes' business if it doesn't lower prices and offer
a limited tier itself.

It might not make sense for such a service to pop up now, while the legal
issues are unsettled, but if TVEyes bears the litigation burden to get those
issues settled, I can't imagine it wouldn't face stiffer competition down the
line.

~~~
sehrope
> $500/month for a service like this?

$500/mo sounds like peanuts for what a service like this provides. For a
business that would use this type of information ( _e.g. TV shows like Daily
Show or Colbert or a political campaign_ ) it's both worth more and cheaper
than doing it in house. The power bill alone for all those TV-tuners/DVRs
would be more than that!

I'm surprised that it's not more expensive.

~~~
fivedogit
I'm fairly certain this is what the daily show uses:

[http://www.snapstream.com/](http://www.snapstream.com/)

... or at least something similar. In other words, they do it themselves.
That's the only way I can explain their uncanny ability to find a dozen clips
containing a certain word or phrase across _very long_ time frames.

~~~
DrewRWx
A tangent, but I thought I remembered The Colbert Report staff developing
something like this in-house. After a bit of searching, it turns out that
staff members had actually developed and spun-off a segment writing and
producing tool [1].

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-17/stephen-
colb...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-17/stephen-colberts-in-
house-tech-startup-wants-to-fix-tv-scripts)

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smtddr
_> >It's a significant digital-age fair use ruling, one that's especially
important for people and organizations who want to comment on or criticize
news coverage._

This is why FOX News sued.

 _> >The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House,
100 members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news
organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press._

This is why FOX News lost.

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pbhjpbhj
Can't they work around this with licensing?

Basically Fox add a clause to their sales contract that says 'use of this type
of thing is not allowed with our service'. That gets pushed down the line to
those buying the service. TVEyes are buying a domestic service, contractually
they can't get that service without committing a tort (breach of contract).
_Et voila_?

Fox surely aren't obliged to provide the service to anyone they do not wish to
supply it to. The inclusion of the Fox media on the service is proof, on the
balance of probabilities, that the contract was broken ...

The judge is ruling that this sort of copyright infringement is not disallowed
by law; but that doesn't surely mean it can't be made impossible by contract.
There is no right to rip down TV broadcasts, surely?

It does seem now that a public facing service offering clips of up to 10
minutes of TV is allowed under this ruling. Presumably that's a new thing in
USA? Also how is this different to offering digests of news websites - so I
can sell NYT stories now as long as I sell lots of other peoples stories too,
and so long as it's recent news, and so long as I don't let them see the whole
NYT website. Clipping services bought the rights to the content.

I think it's a great ruling but I don't think the breadth of it will stand as
I don't consider it to match with the general impetus of copyright law.
Creating a video index using CC and/or speech-to-text (or human transcribers)
doesn't seem particularly transformative to me, especially as the service Fox
are using already is doing similar indexing. The only transformation is in the
utility of the colocation of many channels - since when (other than for
Google!) was "but if we sell everyone's content then it's easier" been a
defence against copyright infringement.

~~~
ianferrel
They can't add a licensing clause if they broadcast it over the air. No one
has to sign a license to receive and record broadcast TV.

If they were solely a cable or internet network, then possibly.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Ah, right, so they only way this would work would be to not off FTA
broadcasts. Who FTA broadcasts Fox, themselves?

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samstave
Does this ruling have any implications for Aerio?

~~~
ianlevesque
No. They are very different services

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ErikRogneby
2200 subscribers = $1.1M monthly revenue. Not bad considering the costs don't
grow that much with additional subscribers. Some for serving the content on
request, but I imagine the ingestion and storage is the big ticket item.

I wonder how long they archive for?

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swang
Per the article, 32 days.

~~~
e40
So, for research farther back, LexisNexis will be needed to find transcripts
only.

~~~
oxidiz
Or for television news content, Internet Archive
[https://tv.archive.org](https://tv.archive.org) has news from 2009 searchable
by the closed captioning text, only Bay Area media market, national and
international. Just added Philadelphia news too.

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typpo
Seems like an interesting technical problem. Does anyone know a good way to
record many TV or radio stations at once, either for storage or realtime
processing?

~~~
wmf
[http://www.snapstream.com/](http://www.snapstream.com/) (I assume it's not
cheap.)

~~~
darkarmani
Wow. Click the prices link. That site is extremely annoying.

