© DepositPhotos / AlphaBaby

Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton wrote that the reason Aereo is still available in Colorado and Utah is that the Utah judge that blocked them there had yet to rule on Aereo’s request for a stay of his injunction.

A short time that article hit the web, Eggerton added an update that US District Court Judge Dale Kimball denied Aereo’s request but would give Aereo a temporary 14-day stay while it appealed his decision to a federal appeals court.

Kimball wrote: “While Aereo’s paying customers benefit from Aereo’s infringement in the form of lower subscription rates, the court assumes that they are mostly unaware of whether Aereo is abiding by governing copyright laws and paying the appropriate licensing fees to engage in such business. This confusion in the marketplace is part of the intangible harms to Plaintiffs.” What garbage! Find me a study of Aereo subscribers that suggests they believe Aereo is paying retransmission consent fees.

Kimball continued: “The court also recognizes that harms are accruing to Plaintiffs every day and enforcement of the copyright laws is a clear public benefit to the public as a whole. The court, however, finds some benefit in allowing Aereo’s customers uninterrupted service pending the Tenth Circuit’s decision on an emergency motion to stay. Therefore, notwithstanding the many factors weighing against a stay, the court, in its discretion, grants Aereo a temporary 14-day stay.”

Given that Kimball wrote that today, that would suggest that we Aereo viewers in Denver have until March 11 or whenever the appeals court rules, whichever comes first. We have that much more time to enjoy it while we can.

© DepositPhotos / Elnur

A couple of days ago, Utah district court judge Dale Kimball granted a preliminary injunction for Fox against Aereo, that spunky online streaming service for over-the-air TV. Kimball’s injunction covers all the states in his district, including Colorado. Which means that, here at FTABlog World Headquarters in Denver, my days of watching Aereo are probably winding to an end.

I was a little surprised that I’m still able to watch 36 hours after the injunction. When I asked the hardest working man in Washington, Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton, he followed up with another note, writing, “Turns out that decision does not become final until after Fox posts a $150,000 bond with the court, which Fox said it planned to do sometime late Thursday or Friday.”

To tell the truth, I’m afraid that this will only change Aereo’s Denver shutdown date by a few months. The Supreme Court will rule on Aereo’s legality this summer, and its post describing the question to be decided matched the broadcasters’ filing as opposed to Aereo’s. That would be very disappointing, forcing every viewer who wants to DVR his OTA channels to set up his own antenna with Windows Media Center or buy a Simple.TV or a Tablo or a ChannelMaster DVR+. Aereo is/was an inexpensive, $0-to-start alternative. As I say all too often about the free-to-air TV world, if it goes away, at least it was nice while it lasted.

Update: Now I hear that Fox might not get around to posting that bond until Monday, giving Aereo another full weekend of life in Utah and Colorado. Fox sure isn’t displaying much urgency in issuing the check that will give it relief from the “irreparable harm” it said it was suffering.

Update 2: Eggerton sent word that Fox finally posted that bond, but Aereo had filed for a stay of the injunction. Until that stay request is decided, Aereo continues to serve Salt Lake City and Denver.

You know what FilmOn needs? A blog.

If our favorite free streaming TV provider had a blog, it could add a post every time something new happened in one of its lawsuits. The FilmOn blog could have noted, as did Wendy Davis of MediaPost, that a couple of weeks ago broadcasters had filed an “emergency motion” to block FilmOn’s appeals until the US Supreme Court rules on the similar Aereo lawsuit. Then FilmOn could have added another post today when, over FilmOn’s objection, a court agreed with that emergency motion and put FilmOn’s appeals on ice, as reported by Colin Mann of Advanced Television. And during legal quiet periods, which now seem likely for a few months, FilmOn founder Alki David could direct his flow of pronouncements and opinions into a regular column in the blog.

One more legal note, the organization behind Chicago PBS station WTTW countersued FilmOn last week, according to yet another fine story by Wendy Davis. FilmOn had asked the courts there for a declaratory judgment that it’s not infringing copyright; this was WTTW’s answer that it strongly disagrees. More about WTTW in a moment.

As much as I’d love to see all these legal proceedings collected under one roof, the main reason I wish FilmOn had a blog is that it might use it to explain what the heck it’s doing with its channels, particularly US over-the-air broadcast channels. A couple of weeks ago, its free service added almost 40 new OTA stations, including superstations, digital sub-channels, and a dozen PBS affiliates. (Some of the new channels have a cute Linux desktop frame, as shown above.)

There’s so much to enjoy about these new channels, mainly because they don’t duplicate programming from the Big Four broadcast networks. There are a dozen CW affiliates, including superstations WGN, KWGN, KTLA, and WPIX. The dozen PBS affiliates, including WTTW, often run local programming too. There are three true independents, from Tampa FL, Atlanta (Peachtree) and Los Angeles. And there are affiliates of the little networks: My Network, MeTV, The Cool, Cozi, Bounce, PBS Kids, PBS World, V-Me, ion (or is it ion Life?), and Qubo.

For a few days last week, FilmOn also offered most of the OTA stations and sub-channels from the Los Angeles market, minus the Big Four affiliates. Today, they’re all gone, an example of why I hesitate to write about new FilmOn channels that can vanish as quickly as they appear. Why did they leave? Will they come back? An official blog could answer those questions.

FilmOn appears to be delivering this prime array of supplemental OTA TV to everyone regardless of market, as opposed to the Big Four affiliates in New York, which are only visible to NYC area viewers. It’s an amazing resource. I wonder how long these will last, or what FilmOn will do next. Sure wish they had a blog to tell us.

Aha! Remember on Halloween when I noticed nimbleTV experimenting with digital sub-channels from over-the-air TV? At the time, I wondered how it could ever stream those channels while keeping their broadcasters happy. We got the answer yesterday when nimbleTV announced that these channels are available for folks who subscribe to certain New York City-based pay-TV providers. For as little as $3.99/month, these subscribers can also subscribe to nimbleTV’s cloud-based DVR and worldwide delivery system.

I’d never seen such a PR push from nimbleTV. The @nimbleTV Twitter account fired up with its first tweets since July, when its epic takedown by Dish changed how it does business. NimbleTV founder and CEO Anand Subramanian emerged for interviews with selected media outlets. “TV today is everywhere — it’s all over the place, and it’s a mess,” Subramanian told The Hollywood Reporter. “Our goal is to make TV easy again for consumers, while doing it in a way that supports the industry. Our approach simply improves existing pay TV — it does not displace it.”

Most reports of the new service characterized it as providing another way to get “pay-TV” channels. But take a look at exactly which channels nimbleTV will sell. Customers from Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, RCN, and FiOS will get the major broadcast networks plus Cozi TV, Livewell, PBS Kids, Antenna, this, CUNY TV and a few others. What these channels all have in common is that they’re all carried in these systems’ TV packages, and that they’re all broadcast over the air. Instead of getting nimbleTV for a bedroom TV, a lot of New Yorkers could just get an OTA antenna. (Maybe OTA TV is a secret after all.)

NimbleTV says it doesn’t have official deals with anybody, so it logically follows that it has its own OTA antenna and is feeding that signal to those cable subscribers. Since the cable systems have paid any necessary retransmission consent fees, the broadcasters might not object as strenuously as they do to Aereo. Subramanian repeated his mantra during the launch interviews. “No one’s getting harmed here. Everyone’s getting paid.”

None of this affects nimbleTV’s existing Dish Network-based service for folks who aren’t NYC cable customers, or who maybe just want a wider variety of channels. As I wrote a couple of months ago, a Dish PR contact told me that “What nimbleTV is doing, Dish regards as illegal.” Subramanian told the Los Angeles Times yesterday that the issue had been resolved.

After months of silence, it’s good to see nimbleTV’s people communicating again, dropping info-nuggets such as almost 80,000 subscribers in July, which is what Subramanian told Variety. I think nimbleTV is a great service, and I hope to hear more about what’s going on there.