Whose side are you on? The big American broadcasters or the little upstart Aereos? For those of you who havent been following the news closely, Aereo created a stir in the US market two years ago when it took free, over-the-air TV signals and streamed them to subscribers on the internet for a small fee. […]
Whose side are you on? The big American broadcasters or the little upstart Aereos?
For those of you who havent been following the news closely, Aereo created a stir in the US market two years ago when it took free, over-the-air TV signals and streamed them to subscribers on the internet for a small fee. More importantly, Aereos main tool is a tiny remote antenna that is hosted at its data centre and leased to subscribers.
American broadcasters including CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox have protested and sued Aereo for copyright infringement. Although the US federal court upheld the ruling of a lower court deeming Aereos service perfectly legal, the case now rests with the Supreme Court and its verdict is likely to have serious implications on content distribution, online streaming, cloud computing, ad-skipping devices and more importantly, the business of TV broadcasting itself.
I asked a well-respected broadcast CTO in Dubai what he thought about this and he said the TV industry must brace itself for some serious change.
What the TV industry is going through today is what the audio industry went through a few years ago and it is inevitable, he explained.
Content is going to be distributed over multiple platforms and newer technologies are going to make it easier to distribute content while it makes life more difficult for traditional broadcasters.
Aereos model is presently restricted to the US landscape, where cable operators primarily offer channels for a fee to subscribers and pay the channels for their content. In the UK, Slingbox offers something similar, where the box is connected to the subscribers digital satellite receiver in the UK and content can be received and viewed remotely in any part of
the world.
The prime difference between Aereo and Slingbox, however, is the size of the technology, which effectively changes the dynamics of the TV market.
The legal implications of using such solutions are still fairly blurred but its perhaps time for broadcasters to start thinking of new ways to generate money. Would the answer lie in making content free and developing other models for revenue generation?