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Chris Wysocki
Caldwell, NJ

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Tuesday, 09 April 2013

Fox threatens to go off the air if courts don't shut down Aereo

What will happend to broadcast TV if they stop actually broadcasting? We may soon find out.

News Corp.'s Fox network will go off the air and become a cable channel if U.S. courts don't stop Internet start-up Aereo Inc. from retransmitting shows like "The Simpsons" without permission, said Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey.

Fox and its affiliate stations would stop broadcasting and serve only pay-TV customers to protect the billions of dollars spent annually on programs, along with advertising revenue and hard-won fees from pay-TV systems, Carey told TV executives today in Las Vegas. A U.S. appeals court last week rejected broadcasters' pleas to shut down Barry Diller's Aereo.

Carey is threatening to upend traditional broadcast TV to counter the peril posed by Aereo, a company backed by Diller, the former Fox network founder. If CBS, NBC and ABC follow, it would and mark an end to television as it's been known since "The Honeymooners" aired in the 1950s. Fox and other networks are evaluating what to do next after the appeals court ruling.

"We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content," Carey said. "This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can't sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that's our only recourse."

There is so much wrong with that last statement that I don't know where to start. Aereo isn't "stealing" anything. The essence of broadcast TV is the ability to actually receive a broadcast. Aereo merely moves the antenna to a location where the signal is good, vs trying to pull in the new digital TV signals with rabbit ears in your living room. Yes, it's a bizarre technical solution to a silly legal problem, but it's really no different from how TV signals were delivered for decades before cable.

And their "hard-won fees from pay TV systems" are only on the table because of those broadcast signals. It's the FCC's "must carry" rule — cable and satellite systems are required to retransmit broadasters' programming and to compensate them accordingly. That's not true for pure cable channels which have to compete on price and content.

How many people would willingly pay to watch the crap put out by Fox and the other networks? As the "Zero TV" movement gains steam my hunch would be "not as many as they'd think."

Good luck Fox. I hope you think this one through. Maybe you could embrace innovation instead of trying to maintain your anachronistic 1950s business model. Try leading instead of hindering. You might even make some money in the process.

Posted at 11:37 by Chris Wysocki [/tech] Comments | Perm Link |
Technorati Tags: TV Fox News-Corp Aereo broadcast-tv pay-tv cable-tv | Tweet

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