[twelvedigits]

I don't think many people had the opportunity to use Aereo. They had a decent presence in New York City, and as the company expanded across the country reporters cited customer numbers in the mid five figures.

As an Aereo user, let me tell you what you missed out on: one of the most amazing products I've ever used.

Aereo "worked." It worked like magic.

First, it lived up to its claim. You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television. Everything was in HD. It worked incredibly well. So many video products fail to deliver on the user experience, or the video is choppy, or it crashes all the time. Aereo's software had its struggles, but it worked far more often than not. I could have people over and stream the Super Bowl and never worry that Aereo would crap out.

Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy. I live in Brooklyn, and Aereo's Brooklyn HQ was less than a mile from my apartment, but we streamed Aereo until we went to sleep that night. Considering reports that their antennae sucked a ton of power, that's incredible on a night when power was out all across the city.

I also interviewed with the company in 2013 for a business development role. Everyone that I met was really great. They treated me well during the process while clearly balancing a million things, including their legal concerns. I really, really wanted to work there, but it wasn't a fit for a lot of reasons, their uncertain future being one of them.

When my girlfriend told me that they were filing for bankruptcy, I was sad. This is innovative technology that worked for consumers, squashed by antiquated government regulation and a highly litigious, innovation-resistant, influential media industry.

Progress, halted.

A winning product that could have delighted millions, squashed.

[kevincennis]

Former Aereo employee here. Thanks so much for the kind words.

That brightened up my day a bit.

[serve_yay]

> You could stream live, broadcast television to your phone or computer, and you could AirPlay it to your television.

Television on your television, you say?

[kenrikm]

Not that I did not see this coming but I wonder if the title is a Freudian slip or intentional. The Next Chapter.. is 11.

[disillusioned]

It's clearly entirely intentional.

[grantc]

12

[untog]

Aereo also worked remarkably well during Hurricane Sandy.

Provided you had internet, yes. Which a lot of people didn't. Over the air broadcasts - which Aereo were retransmitting - don't require any internet connection. In an emergency situation like Sandy a bunny-ears antenna is infinitely more useful than a bandwidth-chewing internet streaming service.

Have you ever tried using one? Given that you live less than a mile from where Aereo is receiving its signal, you might be surprised at the crystal clear, HD quality TV you can get without paying a company $7 a month. Aereo's biggest triumph was making free, over the air broadcasts look like their premium product.

[nemanja]

Yeah, that would make some sense back in 2005, maybe. During Sandy in 2012, Aero was infinitely more useful: when power ran out your TV with bunny ears became completely useless. On the other hand, you could still watch Aero on your battery powered HSPA connected smart phone. While I am sure bunny-ears antennas work great in more rural areas, they are completely useless on Manhattan.

[thedufer]

OTA is pretty terrible throughout Brooklyn. Unless you live at the top of a tall building, you're basically out of luck. I have a fairly clear view of the sky from my window, and I "get" 2-3 channels (my TV can identify them as channels, but you can't actually watch anything).

[twelvedigits]

Bought one, it didn't work for me. Couldn't pick up a signal anywhere. Also, if I wanted to record shows I'd have to hook it to a Tivo (or similar device) which has an up-front cost and a monthly fee. Aereo provided the whole package in a low monthly cost.

[untog]

You don't need a Tivo - just a USB tuner stick and MythTV, or some other open source solution. Granted if the antenna doesn't work then it doesn't work - I had some success buying a powered one.

[defen]

You don't need Dropbox, just a Linux box and some rsync scripts. $7 is approximately 5 minutes worth of income for a lot of people on here...so if it takes longer than that per month to set up and maintain your solution then it's not a good deal.

[rayiner]

What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?

Look: the valuable product here is the content. All the technology can do is get in the way. It's great Aereo's technology got in the way less than its competitors, but that still doesn't mean people found the technology itself valuable. The content is what matters. The content is what delights consumers.

Given that reality, I think it's absurd to say that regulations protecting the people who create the content, the product without which the whole downstream ecosystem of streaming services and content consumption devices are utterly irrelevant, it's absurd to say those regulations are antiquated.

[twelvedigits]

Keeping in mind that this content is being broadcast over public spectrum, you're right: the content is the most valuable product.

As a consumer, I want to access that content in an efficient, functional manner. My tax dollars are paying for it. So, I bought an antenna. It couldn't pick up any stations in my apartment, and this is a very common problem in NYC. Even if it picked up stations, I'd have to buy a separate device to record shows so that I can watch them on my schedule.

With Aereo, I was renting an antenna. The company built capital-intensive, power-sucking data warehouses in every city in which it operated and filled them with antennae for every customer. Aereo provided me with a cloud-based antenna, no different than buying one from Best Buy or Amazon.

Only:

(a) the signal was clear and reliable, not fuzzy. My friend has a long coaxial cable connected to his television and he tapes a 12" x 12" antenna to his window. Kind of ridiculous.

(b) they included a cloud-based DVR that allowed me to watch what I want, when I want. They improved the relationship that I had with broadcast content.

Aereo was very clear about the fact that they built a solution that adhered to the law because everyone had an individual antenna. This solution was very expensive, but it worked and though it was described as a Rube Goldberg machine, it made sense.

And here's the ultimate rub for content companies: now I don't watch your content at all. I don't see your ads. I have someone else's cable password, and I watch things sporadically, but I don't discover new shows like you want me to.

[harryh]

Your tax dollars are paying for TV show production?

[tapsboy]

No. But our eyeballs watching those paid ads on free broadcast TV are enabling payments + profit for the production of that content. The numbers may vary by broadcaster and program, but the business model is clear, or atleast was.

[harryh]

The people that make TV shows make money in several different ways. Paid ads are only a portion of their business.

[jcampbell1]

I come down on the other side. The networks get the airwaves for free. It was a reasonable deal -- free bandwidth in exchange for a public service and an ad supported business model.

If the networks want to give up their bandwidth and let the government auction it off, fine. I just don't like this crap that they get the spectrum for free, and I can't rent an antennae of my choosing.

IMO, either we allow Aereo, or we make the networks pay for the spectrum, or we get rid of over the air and use it for cell data.

I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed.

[rayiner]

You're precisely right: it was a deal.[1] The broadcasters get the airwaves for free, and the public gets TV over those airwaves for free. The deal said nothing about allowing people to capture content over those airwaves and broadcast it over the Internet. You can hardly blame companies for not wanting to give up more on their end of a deal than they agreed to give up!

[1] I think it's a waste of valuable spectrum on creaky inefficient technology, mind you, but it's the deal the government made.

[jcampbell1]

I think you Kennedy and Roberts are all on the same page in thinking Aereo quacked like a retransmission company.

The problem is Aereo got greedy and screwed up the marketing. Had their homepage always said, rent a streaming DVR for $10 a month, it wouldn't be a problem. Capturing content and streaming it over the internet is perfectly legal. TiVo does it. Cablevision does it. Slingbox does it.

Aereo should have acted like a hardware rental company until after the supreme court ruling.

[pissmonger]

Are you really saying that Aereo failed due to a marketing? They always presented themselves as a technology platform that leases equipment.

[thedufer]

"broadcast" is the wrong word here. The whole point of Aereo is that it was unicast, which is hard to rationalize as being different from running a wire.

[varelse]

"I am all for people getting paid for their content, but your argument is like saying libraries should be outlawed."

I suspect if you set up a privately owned library and lent out bestsellers, that's exactly what would happen.

That said, it'd be a real kicker IMO if the government stepped in and started broadcasting everything on the public airwaves for free anywhere in the world over the Internet. If the broadcasters don't like that, tough, go broadcast on cable. Of course, this will never happen because corporatocracy...

[sib]

"I suspect if you set up a privately owned library and lent out bestsellers, that's exactly what would happen."

The First Sale Doctrine would disagree with you.

[bjt]

You can rent books here: http://www.chegg.com/

and here: http://www.bookrenter.com/

[jcampbell1]

Renting books is perfectly legal in the US.

[discardorama]

> What is antiquated about the idea that you don't get to use other peoples' valuable content without paying for it?

Slingbox allows you to stream broadcast content without problems. Broadcasters are OK with that. So Aereo was basically renting out 1000s of little slingboxes; how's that a problem now?

[rsync]

Also, it's worth noting that there are slingbox colocation services in the world where you can rent a slingbox in a remote datacenter in the TV market you prefer...

[snowwrestler]

Can you replicate the functionality of Aereo that way? If so, why is Aereo's bankruptcy a loss? Could all of Aereo's customers just go rent a Slingbox instead? Legitimately curious here.

[pissmonger]

According recent law passed by SCOTUS owning a Slinbox is OK, renting one is not.

Aereo was exactly like slingbox, except you leased the equipment rather than own it.

[res0nat0r]

Slingbox allows customers to privately rebroadcast content they have a license to view unlike Aereo which did not have that right.

[thedufer]

No one is claiming Aereo has that right. They're claiming that the person renting the antenna does.

The implication of the case seems to be that renting an antenna does not give you those rights in the same way buying one does, which is bizarre and kind of hard to rationalize.

[res0nat0r]

You can rent an antenna and do this privately to you and your household, you can't do this as a 3rd party company according to the law.

[crazypyro]

Except the whole argument was that the 3rd party company wasn't doing it, it was simply providing a location for the customer's rented property to sit, wasn't it?

[res0nat0r]

Not sure why a fact is something that should be so disagreeable to be downvoted. I know the truth hurts for this issue, but that is reality.

[psychometry]

You realize that OTA HDTV is...free, right? Explain to me how any content provider lost a single dollar because of Aereo's existence.

[untog]

Because cable companies pay broadcast companies to redistribute broadcast content - it's a major source of income for the broadcast companies. The cable companies said that if Aereo were allowed to get away with what they were doing then they'd do the same thing themselves.

[discardorama]

So Aereo was screwed because _cable_ companies decided to overpay? Can you imagine if you bought a car, and then the dealership comes back to you for more money because your neighbor paid much more for the same model?

[untog]

Aereo was screwed over because _cable_ companies were legally mandated to pay for broadcast content, and Aereo skirted that law.

[baddox]

So a completely unrelated third party has a completely separate deal with content producers that has nothing to do with the legal free OTA broadcasts. Still doesn't add up.

[psychometry]

OK, but do you understand that cable companies primarily provide cable channels as their service? You're comparing apples to oranges.

[apaprocki]

Aereo's model wasn't limited to OTA. It wasn't publicized a lot, but Bloomberg TV was the first non-OTA channel to stream over Aereo.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873239815045781...

[pissmonger]

Then tell ABC, CBS, FOX, & PBS to get off the effin airways and become cable-only. Surely there are those who would find uses for the bandwidth that would serve the community

[aidenn0]

You can protect your content, up until you broadcast it publicly; then people who want to can watch it. If aereo is over the line, but having an antenna on your roof isn't, then it starts to become unclear where the line is.

[snowwrestler]

If the value of Aereo's service was the technology, then couldn't they have stayed in business by paying licensing fees on the content? Ultimately, that's what the legal disagreement was over--the fees, not the technology.

[morninj]

The content owners would have to agree to license their works to Aereo.

[the_ancient]

Which is another problem with copyright law

If you want a legal monpoly over your works, you should not be able to pick and choose which services can rebroadcast it.

If you offer your channel to comcast you should be required to offer to any other service for the same fee or substantially the same fee,

That should be the string that is attached for intellectual privilege,

[dragonwriter]

> If you want a legal monpoly over your works, you should not be able to pick and choose which services can rebroadcast it.

The ability to control who uses something is exactly what a legal monopoly over it is.

Its like saying of personal property, "if you want a legal monopoly over your things, you shouldn't be able to pick and choose who can borrow them."

[the_ancient]

Hardly, there is no such thing as intellectual property.

With property you have exclusive access over a physical item, with intellectual privilege the government is granting you the exclusive control over an idea, visual or audio representation of an idea, or some other non-physical concept.

for example Copyright does not apply to a DVD it applies to the visual idea's and representation of those idea that happened to be stored on a DVD

The government created this artificial privilege and enforces that with threats of violence.

It is in no way akin to property, nor does is have any analogous relationship to property.

[ufmace]

Yes, the content is what's valuable. And it's already paid for by the ads, which are part of the content stream. As far as I know, Aereo wasn't interfering with those ads in any way. The providers are getting exactly the same deal that they always have - your eyeballs on their ads in exchange for content.

I don't see how they can legitimately claim that they are entitled to more money because it's all happening over the internet instead of in your living room, especially when they aren't lifting a finger to distribute over the internet themselves.

[morninj]

Copyright law forces cable companies to pay to retransmit content. According to the Supreme Court, Aereo is "substantially similar" to a cable system, so it's bound by the same requirements. Unfortunately for Aereo, it's not actually a cable company, so it can't participate in the compulsory licensing scheme.

[the_ancient]

That is why the court ruling is wrong..

it is either a cable company, and gets the compulsory license, or it is not.

This was a Incorrect ruling by the courts, which is par for the courts, the Supreme Court gets it wrong more than it gets right

[taude]

I was a big fan. I live behind a hill, so getting the local terrestrial channels OTA is impossible. Aereo made this possible plus some great features like the DVR functionality for $8/month, with the ability to watch in my kitchen (on a laptop/tablet) was great because I live in an old building and running coax to all the rooms isn't really an option. We are a household with minimal live TV requirements. It was nice to watch the Olympics.

Unfortunately, we're back on Cable. Luckily there was a cheap package for 12 months to get us back on. I'll likely be cancelling at the end of the time, though.