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The Telecom Digest for May 31, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 118 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 06:20:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Aereo's Internet TV service is so good it's scary
Message-ID: <d61853a2-d630-4460-9bcb-a875cc571416@b2g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>
By Hiawatha Bray - [Boston] Globe Staff - May 30, 2013
| My favorite thing about network television is that I watch so
| little of it. It's like getting a few extra hours of life
| every week. But for those who can't get enough of the stuff,
| Boston just became a little more entertaining.
|
| Today marks the local launch of Aereo. It's a new Internet-
| based service that lets subscribers watch live television
| broadcasts in a variety of ways -- on their personal computers;
| on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch; or on a standard
| television equipped with Apple TV or the Roku Internet TV
| device.
Continued:
http://tinyurl.com/n9v7m4w
Hey, Bill -- have you signed up yet?
Later in the article:
| Executives at CBS and Fox have said that if Aereo survives
| court challenges, they may stop over-the-air broadcasts
| altogether, and offer their shows only via cable and
| satellite. But US Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona,
| has filed legislation that would revoke the license of any
| television broadcaster that goes off the air.
Well, I guess if a broadcaster goes off the air, it probably doesn't
need a license.
Bray, like McCain, apparently doesn't understand the difference
between a "broadcaster" (licensee of a broadcast station) with
"broadcast network." As I've noted before in this space, if some
network (CBS or FOX, for example) decides to go cable-only (by
abrogating or just not renewing affiliation agreements with non-owned
broadcasters), those broadcasters aren't going to turn in their
licenses and go off the air.
See previous thread at
http://tinyurl.com/pr56jfv
.
Neal McLain
Date: Thu, 30 May 2013 16:09:24 +0000 (UTC)
From: wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Aereo's Internet TV service is so good it's scary
Message-ID: <ko7tjk$f7c$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>
In article <d61853a2-d630-4460-9bcb-a875cc571416@b2g2000yqe.googlegroups.com>,
Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com> wrote:
[quoting a Boston Globe article by Hiawatha Bray:]
>| Executives at CBS and Fox have said that if Aereo survives
>| court challenges, they may stop over-the-air broadcasts
>| altogether, and offer their shows only via cable and
>| satellite. But US Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona,
>| has filed legislation that would revoke the license of any
>| television broadcaster that goes off the air.
>
>Well, I guess if a broadcaster goes off the air, it probably doesn't
>need a license.
In fact, if any broadcaster goes off the air for more than a year,
their license expires automatically, under a little-known provision of
the Telecommunications Act. Furthermore, a broadcaster must get FCC
permission to be off the air for even as long as three months --
although this is nearly always granted absent a showing of bad faith
on the part of the licensee.
>Bray, like McCain, apparently doesn't understand the difference
>between a "broadcaster" (licensee of a broadcast station) with
>"broadcast network."
Just like the vast majority of the public.
For those few of us who care, I will note that the CBS and Fox
stations in the Boston market, where Bray lives and works, are owned
by their respective networks, and CBS also owns the My outlet.
Comcast-NBC owns the Telemundo station, and Univision owns the UniMas
station -- which, by the way, it bought from Barry Diller a dozen
years ago -- but it's operated [by] Entravision, which owns the
regular Univision station. Both ABC stations are owned by Hearst, and
the NBC and CW affiliates are owned by Ed Ansin's Sunbeam Broadcasting
(co-owned with Fox affiliate WSVN in Miami). CBS and NBC both used to
own stations in nearby Providence but have since divested them.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wollman@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
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