Jacob Kastrenakes recaps yesterday’s SCOTUS ruling against the streaming-TV service:
In a 6–3 ruling, the court found that Aereo’s service violates the Copyright Act by playing back recordings of broadcasters’ TV shows – even though it legally captures those shows over the air and obtains individual copies for each viewer. Aereo had argued that it was merely providing technology that its subscribers were renting in order to watch TV, positing that the viewers were responsible for playing back those recordings. …
The ruling is one of the most important seen by the television industry since the 1984 Betamax case but in many ways will have an opposite effect, stifling one area of innovation that was beginning to force the industry out of its comfort zone. “Insofar as there are differences, those differences concern not the nature of the service that Aereo provides so much as the technological manner in which it provides the service,” the ruling reads.
Brian Barrett is disappointed:
It’s a precedent that will make the future of streaming content both stunted and confusing. And that, beyond present and would-have-been future Aereo subscribers being pretty bummed out, is the biggest concern about today’s ruling. While the decision doesn’t prevent future technologies from developing, it does set a precedent that’s going to be very hard for future cord-cutting efforts to get around.
But Kyle Chayka sees little reason for innovators to be concerned:
Importantly, the ruling is not relevant for other cloud-based services, which may have been impacted by a judgment on Aereo’s business. The Department of Justice amicus brief advised that the Aereo decision “need not call into question the legitimacy of innovative technologies that allow consumers to use the Internet to store, hear, and view their own lawfully acquired copies of copyright works.”
David Post isn’t too concerned either:
The majority is at pains, in several places, to say that the case is just about broadcast television and the re-transmission of broadcast signals. Not about cloud storage, or streaming services, or gaming platforms, or anything else. Just broadcast TV, and what you may or may not do with over-the-air broadcast signals. Congress has made a choice about those signals; anyone who re-transmits them (like the cable companies do) has to pay royalties to the broadcasters. If that’s what it means … the decision has nothing to say about any other content-delivery or content-storage platforms that deal with the vast array of non-broadcast-TV content.
Timothy Lee, however, stresses the ambiguity in the ruling:
The problem is that the court never provides clear criteria for this “looks-like-cable-TV” rule. As Justice Scalia puts it in his dissent, “it will take years, perhaps decades, to determine which automated systems now in existence are governed by the traditional volitional-conduct test and which get the Aereo treatment. (And automated systems now in contemplation will have to take their chances.)”
In the process of ruling against Aereo, the Supreme Court has created a mess that will take lower courts years to clean up. Online services that are similar to Aereo in some respects and different in others are more likely to face lawsuits, and the lower courts will have to sort out which services are similar enough to Aereo to face copyright liability.
What’s next for Aereo? They’re “probably done”:
Aereo’s backers have said there’s “no plan B” for the company in the aftermath of today’s loss. The tens of millions of dollars the company raised so far have largely gone to pay legal costs, and the road forward for the company is probably either a fire-sale of the core technology or a quick pivot into some other, DVR-like function. Aereo’s CEO claims that “our work is not done,” but it’s tough to know what that means. Without the ability to skip out on retransmission fees, Aereo’s entire business model is gone.
Alyssa warns the TV industry against complacency:
Broadcasters should not take their victory at the Supreme Court as a sign that they will be able to operate the same way forever. Instead, broadcast and cable companies should take the Aereo ruling as a stay before Congress acts to explicitly legalize competitors such as Aereo. In the time they have been given, they should move as fast as possible to respond to the clear customer demands that Aereo exposed. …
What might the market have been like if Hulu had partnered with Roku to offer not just streaming subscriptions, but a set-top box, offering consumers a complete package as an alternative to a cable subscription? Similarly, it is remarkable that Apple and a cable company have not yet been able to come to terms to bake television subscriptions into Apple TVs. AmazonBasics, the electronics line from Amazon (the company’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), sells a range of relatively inexpensive television antennas, and the company El Gato makes a range of streaming television tuners that are not yet available in the United States.
Rather than leaving these innovations to others, cable companies and broadcasters should find ways to get on board and bring new products and services in-house.
The Dish 