Posted on 04/09/2013 1:51:58 PM PDT by illiac
A senior News Corp. executive is threatening to pull the company’s flagship Fox network from the public airwaves if it loses its legal battle against Barry Diller’s Aereo.
Speaking at the annual gathering of the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas, Chase Carey, News Corp’s president and chief operating officer, said Fox could become a pay-TV channel.
His remarks come one week after a federal appeals court rejected a plea by the broadcast industry to shut down New York-based Aereo, which uses an array of tiny antennas to pick up free broadcast signals and transmit them to subscribers over the Internet.
“If we can’t have our rights properly protected through legal and governmental solutions, we will pursue a business solution,” said Carey, adding, “One solution would be to take the network and make it a subscription service. We’re not going to sit idly by and let people steal our content.”
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
Several of the major networks have been contemplating going off the free airwaves. This isn’t a surprise.
“If we can’t have our rights properly protected through legal and governmental solutions, we will pursue a business solution,” said Carey, adding, “One solution would be to take the network and make it a subscription service. We’re not going to sit idly by and let people steal our content.”
They are all blustering. I seldom watch broadcast anyway. Maybe the local news from time to time.
Good! One less liberal network to deal with.
I don’t understand this.
They make money by selling advertising time. The rate they charge is based on how many eyeballs are watching at the time.
I would think anything that would increase the number of eyeballs would be a good thing.
I have one word to say...
Mark
How do you count the number of people watching via Aereo’s feed without the rights to get stats from Aereo?
How do you count the number of people watching via their roof antennae? Same as with Aereo - you don't. What the OTA broadcasters are ticked about is that they believe Aereo is "rebroadcasting" without kicking back loot to the networks. Plain and simple - this is about greed by networks that are in decline and have been for quite some time.
Aereo has an interesting defense: They are merely allowing users to access the already free content via their antennas. So far it is holding up - I hope it continues to do so.
Once ala carte television is available, no one in their right mind would pay for cable or satellite packages or bundles. It's 100s of channels of crap.
Semi-off-topic and this has been bothering me: the other day I clicked on the new America One, or One America, I forget, and it starting gnawing on my hard drive harder than Excel trying to divide by 0.
Anybody else have this happen?
It’s a new conservative network set to air this summer.
On the rare occasions when I see a good show I tell all that the show is so good that FOX would cancel it.
Sure. That doesn't make them a broadcaster. If I charge my neighbor $5.00 to splice into my roof antenna to watch NBC OTA, am I rebroadcasting?
I am not technical so I do not know how any of this stuff works. That is why they pay others the big bucks.
What I do know is if they take it off of over the air broadcast to paid service they will have fewer eyeballs then they do now.
I guess then it will be easier to count since fewer is always easier.
They count OTA via Nielsen. Millions of people have a little box that reports back what channels they are watching at any one moment. How do you think they know that CNN gets sucktastic viewer numbers?
Aereo offers no such vehicle. Therefore, the broadcast companies have no way of validating what they charge their advertisers.
Aereo offers no such vehicle. Therefore, the broadcast companies have no way of validating what they charge their advertisers.
I am very well aware of how ratings are statistically generated as well as the algorithms utilized to analyze the data. My point was: Do you consider the Neilsen data to be statistically relevant given the number of options available to consumers these days? I think not. Metering what is being viewed is actually much more accurately done via the internet. OTA broadcasters have no reasonable expectation to be paid per viewer when they broadcast their signal, unencrypted, for everyone to view at will. If they wish to descend into the cable model, so be it. However, as soon as ala carte options are available, people will flee from the bundled crap that makes you share in the expense of 100's of channels in order to enjoy the five or six that you utilize. Aereo is the beginning of the capability to have ala carte programming - that is why networks and broadcasters will hate it - it means the end game to the easy cable / satellite and advertising money based on ratings data that is less accurate than BLS labor statistics.
Does the network have the ability to “meter” the “network” owned by Aereo? Not likely, without getting into some sort of agreement. One could presume that Aereo is hoping to make money off of what it is doing by getting into contracts like Nielsen has, and therefore this is bribery.
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