By Al Lewis
I always imagined Americans would get so hacked off about their
pay-TV bills that they'd one day climb onto their rooftops, strap
antennae to their chimneys and start watching network TV shows the
way they used to be watched: free.
Aereo, a New York-based Internet startup backed by media mogul
Barry Diller, wants to save them the trouble. For $8 to $12 a
month, Aereo will rent consumers their own personal antenna and
storage on computer servers. This will allow them to watch and
record their favorite shows from any device: TVs, computers,
tablets and even cellphones.
Understandably, the nation's giant broadcast companies don't
like Aereo, because they get billions in fees from pay-TV
providers. Aereo only makes it easier for people to get the signals
that broadcasters send out free.
Broadcasters -- including Comcast's NBC, Disney's ABC, CBS and
21st Century Fox -- have been suing to stop Aereo. They've gone all
the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard their arguments last
week. (Until June of last year, 21st Century Fox and The Wall
Street Journal parent News Corp were part of the same company.)
Broadcasters argue that Aereo is illegally distributing
copyrighted content. Aereo argues that it is only renting dime-size
antennae and the cloud-computing equivalent of DVR space, allowing
consumers to do what they can legally do in their homes,
anyway.
The court is expected to decide the case this summer.
The Obama administration has filed a brief supporting
broadcasters, marking the last time I will pay to watch President
Obama on TV.
The National Football League also wrote in support of
broadcasters. Yes, the tax-exempt pro-football league, making
cities build its stadiums and gouging fans in every way imaginable,
is coming down hard on Aereo.
Let's review some TV history here: Broadcasters were originally
given monopolistic control of the publicly owned airwaves in
exchange for providing free TV signals to the people. Advertisers
paid for it and consumers suffered their stupid commercials.
Eventually, though, consumers grew tired of the ads, so the once
commercial-free cable-television industry was born.
Over the years, paid-TV rates grew exponentially faster than
inflation. Paid providers started blasting out commercials, too.
And now millions of Americans pay as much as $100 or more a month
to be brainwashed by mind-numbing pitches. Enter Aereo.
Aereo won't drive pay-TV providers out of business. They, after
all, provide Internet connections, too, and offer other
programming.
Aereo won't drive broadcasters out of business, either. It will
expand their audiences, making their advertising more valuable.
Additionally, broadcasters could start their own Internet streaming
services and undercut Aereo. Or they could take their precious
programming off the public airways so Aereo can't get it.
They just don't want to. They like "disruptive technology" only
when they can use it to disrupt someone else.
Aereo is a tiny company, and its services are available only in
about a dozen cities. Its business model may not even work if it
grows to millions of tiny antennae and fathomless terabytes of
personally recorded TV shows. But for now it's getting free
advertising.
The news has people who never heard of this innovative service
turning to Aereo.com. Go check it out.
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Al Lewis is a columnist based in Denver. He blogs at
tellittoal.com; his email address is al.lewis@tellittoal.com
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