Aereo's Internet TV service is so good it's scary [telecom]

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:

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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

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Neal McLain

[quoting a Boston Globe article by Hiawatha Bray:]

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.

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