And that runs up against some of the fairly ridiculous rules that content providers have been throwing up for years to extract money out of consumers.
Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is bullshit.
This kind of misses the point that I can get broadcast for free by putting up an antenna at my house right now. I can do that at my neighbor's house or a piece of land down the road or even two states over. So... Again, at what point does this become not OK? This has been a real issue with broadcast spectrum for a while now (it shows up in other areas) and I'm glad Aero is challenging it to get a decision.
Yes, You can do it. But in Aereo's case you didn't, they did. They set up a small forest of individual antennas in a central location, then invited members of the public to lease them. It's top down, whereas what you are describing is bottom up.
If you had negotiated the right to hang a dime-size antenna of the Empire State building, with a home-brewed DVR accessible over the net, and then your friends and acquaintances had done the same thing, and eventually you had clubbed together and hired a janitor to keep an eye on the whole thing, so to speak, then it would have been a community thing that aggregated around a single point (a tall building where I imagine TV reception is good). Aereo is more of an astroturfing operation. It differs from your scenario in the same way that a housing subdivision built out by a developer differs from a village.
Most people pay technicians or contractors to install antennas. Hell, some people pay for remote antennas in the mountains. I fail to see the difference.
Does a viewer suddenly become "not local" if the signal gets to their house through the internet instead of an antenna?
The studios aren't concerned that someone will switch from an antenna to Aeveo, they're worried that someone will switch from cable to Aeveo. Even broadcast channels have been getting into the re-transmission fee game and they don't want to give it up. Frankly, I'm not worried that their business model is being disrupted.
The other issue is that ratings aren't well tracked for streams. This is more a problem that Nielson or someone similar needs to correct but it is a problem. And unless/until Aeveo viewers are counted in the ratings the broadcasters get no benefit from their existence.
The local targeting of ads is actually a minor point. Six minutes per hour of the ads you see are local ads, twelve minutes are national ads sold by the parent network. Also, Aero shows you the local affiliate stream so you're still seeing the local ads. At its core this case is about content rights.
Boo hoo. If broadcasters don't like the rules, they should go cable-only and give the public back its spectrum, so that it can be put to a use that best serves the public.
Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is bullshit.