Cord cutters ain't dead yet

[Bob Of Burleson]

After Supreme Court Ruling,
Aereo’s Rivals in TV Streaming
Seize Opening

By EMILY STEEL
The New York Times

Mark Ely saw an opportunity, and he took it.

The day after the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo in a copyright case brought by the nation’s major broadcasters, Mr. Ely was trying to scoop up Aereo customers by promoting his start-up, Simple.TV, on social media. “Former Aereo customer? Join the Simple.TV Family,” the company wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

“We’re telling Aereo customers: ‘Your favorite service is going away. Here’s an idea that isn’t,’ ” Mr. Ely, who started his company in 2011, said in an interview.

The television establishment still has much to worry about after its Supreme Court victory on Wednesday over Aereo, the digital start-up that had threatened to upend the economics of the media business.

“Television is a castle filled with money,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the Publicis Groupe’s digital marketing unit. “People are trying to get into that castle and take some money.”

But while the court’s decision broadens the moat, traditional broadcasters still must find ways to defend themselves against an array of companies like Mr. Ely’s that want to give viewers an alternative to the their model.

Eager for a piece of the $167 billion American television market, dozens of companies are offering options for the growing number of viewers known as cord cutters, who are canceling their traditional pay-television subscriptions. The providers range from Hulu, which the broadcasters own, to bigger services like Amazon, Google and Netflix, all of which offer cheaper streaming alternatives.

Other companies, including Roku, Sling Media, TiVo, Simple.TV and Mohu, sell hardware that allows viewers to stream television to digital devices or watch web video on television sets. And Aereo may yet stick around; the company said on Saturday that it would pause its service temporarily as it sorted out its options but that its journey was “far from done.”

“I don’t think you are going to find a silver bullet to disrupt the broadcast industry,” said Kenneth Lerer, a venture capitalist who has invested in a series of digital media start-ups. “I think you are going to find a lot of little bullets. Aereo was hoping it was a silver bullet.”

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[Bob Of Burleson]

How to recreate Aereo
in your own home—
legally, and for less

By Aaron Sankin
DailyDot.com

On Wednesday morning, the United States Supreme Court effectively drove a stake through the heart of Aereo, a company that allowed users to stream network television over the Internet. Aereo also functions as a DVR service, letting its customers watch local programming they had recorded and stored on the company’s cloud-based servers. Aereo's CEO has pledged to keep the the company going, but the demise or its current service is all but assured.

Broadcasters didn’t like Aereo, which charges customers a $8 monthly fee, because the New York-based, Barry Diller-backed startup consciously avoided paying them the billions of dollars in retransmission fess cable and satellite providers always ponied up to carry their content. The broadcasters viewed the Aereo case as an existential threat—so much so that a top News Corp executive said Fox might move to cable if the decision didn’t go its way—and, as such, successfully sued to get Aereo shut down on copyright infringement grounds.

Despite their court victory, the cat may be out of the bag for broadcasters. The existential threat to their business model wasn’t so much that Aereo could assign a tiny antenna to each subscriber then beam last night’s episode of American Idol to their iPad. The real danger was that a very large amount of people, over 100,000 in New York City alone, were willing to pay a relatively small amount of money to forego cable and satellite, instead opting for what amounted to the combination of a TiVo box and an antenna.

Here’s the thing: Cobbling together the parts necessary to legally recreate Aereo on your own isn’t particularity expensive or difficult. In fact, drawn out over a long enough timeline, it’ll probably even save you money over shelling out for Aereo.

To recreate Aereo, the first thing you’re going to need is a way to get the broadcast TV signals from the air and onto one of the many glowing rectangles in your home.

HOW TO DO IT