AirTV screenshot

This screenshot from the AirTV promo video is strangely Denver-specific. Our ABC affiliate Channel 7 broadcasts on both VHF and UHF, causing many over-the-air tuners to list it twice.

Just before the CES exhibit floor opens Thursday, Dish Network announced that its AirTV set-top box is available for purchase. The AirTV player supports SlingTV (another Dish subsidiary), YouTube and Netflix, streaming up to 4K quality. What’s most intriguing at this blog is that, with an optional over-the-air TV dongle, “access to local OTA channels is integrated into the Sling TV channel guide.”

AirTV released a cute promotional video that you can watch here (warning: autoplay). Most viewers won’t see OTA duplicates as shown at 0:35, but the guide information looks good for what we can see of it. Even better is the revelation that the AirTV player will allow users to download Android apps from the Google Play Store. The voice-enabled remote controls “all HDTVs and external audio devices.” Sounds like a great deal at $100 without OTA, and even better at $130 with the OTA dongle, and amazing considering that it includes $50 in SlingTV credit.

There are a lot more details in the press release, but left unaddressed is whether there will be any subscription charges for guide data. That’s going to be one of my first questions when I visit the Dish/Sling booth at CES later this week. Meanwhile, here’s a comparison you won’t find anywhere else: Take a look at the OTA dongle that AirTV sells.

AirTV OTA adapter

Now look at the Hauppauge 1191 USB TV Tuner, available on Amazon and elsewhere.

I guarantee that the AirTV OTA USB dongle is a rebranded Hauppauge like the one FilmOn once sent me. I’ve used that OTA dongle for years when I travel with my laptop to bring in OTA signals. So it’s possible that the AirTV version might be valuable even when you’re not home. I’ll let you know what I find out this week.

Every January 1 always makes me a little sad. If we still operated on the same copyright laws that were in place when I was a kid, then some of the works created when I was a kid (or a few decades earlier) would now be freely available in the public domain. The Center for the Study of the Public Domain points out every year a sampling of the new works we really should have had available – it never made sense to change copyright rules retroactively. Here’s the report for 2017:

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years—an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1960 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2017, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2056.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in other countries are different—thousands of works are entering the public domain in Canada and the EU on January 1.

Born Free

What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.
The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich A. Hayek book cover

  • Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
  • John Updike, Rabbit, Run
  • Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds
  • William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
  • Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
  • Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt
  • Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
  • Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
  • John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique

Dr. Seuss's Sam-I-Am running with a book on a platter: Read them freely! And you may. Share them and you may, I say. ...But not until 2056.The books above are but a fraction of what would be entering the public domain on January 1. Imagine them being freely available to students and teachers around the world. Readers interested in iconic stories of courage in the face of racial injustice, or middle class America in the late 1950s, or just great literature, would have something to celebrate. In the current political climate, Shirer’s work, and also those of Hayek, Bell, and Schlesinger, might provide food for thought. And Dr. Seuss’s beloved books would be legally available for free online for children (of all ages).

You would be free to use these books in your own stories, adapt them for theater, animate them, or make them into a film. You could translate them into other languages, or create accessible Braille or audio versions.2 You could read them online or buy cheaper print editions, because others were free to republish them. Empirical studies have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions and formats, and more likely to be in print—see here, here, and here. Take, for example, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater—like the works listed above, it was published in 1960; but unlike those works, it’s in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed. You can legally download it for free, and the purchase price for an eBook is $0.99, instead of $10 or $20.

Imagine a digital Library of Alexandria containing all of the world’s books from 1960 and earlier, where, thanks to technology, you can search, link, annotate, copy and paste. (Google Books has brought us closer to this reality, but for copyrighted books where there is no separate agreement with the copyright holder, it only shows three short snippets, not the whole book.) Instead of seeing these literary works enter the public domain in 2017, we will have to wait until 2056.

The Frozen-in-Time Machine

Consider the films and television shows from 1960 that would have become available this year. Fans could share clips with friends or incorporate them into homages. Local theaters could show the full features. Libraries and archivists would be free to digitize and preserve them. Here are a few of the movies that we won’t see in the public domain for another 39 years.
The Apartment movie poster

  • The Time Machine
  • Psycho
  • Spartacus
  • Exodus
  • The Apartment
  • Inherit the Wind
  • The Magnificent Seven
  • Ocean’s 11
  • The Alamo
  • The Andy Griffith Show (first episodes)
  • The Flintstones (first episodes)

These works are famous, so thanks to projects like the National Film Registry, we’re not likely to lose them entirely. The true tragedy is that of forgotten films that are literally disintegrating while preservationists wait for their copyright terms to expire.3

The Magnificent...Life-Plus-70?

It’s Now or . . . 2056?

What 1960 music could you have used without fear of a lawsuit? If you wanted to find guitar tabs or sheet music and freely use some of the great music from this year, January 1, 2017 would have been a rocking day for you under earlier copyright laws. Elvis Presley’s hit song It’s Now or Never (Wally Gold, Aaron Schroeder) would be available. So would Only the lonely (know the way I feel) (Roy Orbison, Joe Melson), Save the Last Dance for Me (Mort Shuman, Jerome Pomus), and Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (Paul J. Vance, Lee Pockriss). Your school would be free to stage public performances of the songs from the musical Camelot (Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe). Or you could set a video to Harry Belafonte’s Grizzly Bear (Harry Belafonte, Robert DeCormier, Milt Okun) from Swing Dat Hammer. Today, these musical works remain copyrighted until 2056.4

Science from 1960—copyrighted research, still behind paywalls

1960 was another significant year for science. Max Perutz and Sir John Kendrew published articles on the structure of hemoglobin and the structure of myoglobin, respectively, and Robert Burns Woodward published an article describing a total synthesis of chlorophyll. (All three later won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry.) Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first working laser, a ruby laser. And the US launched its first successful weather satellite, TIROS-1.

If you follow the links above (and you do not have a subscription or institutional access), you will see that these 1960 articles are still behind paywalls. You can purchase the individual articles from the journal Nature for $32. A distressing number of scientific articles from 1960 require payment or a subscription or account, including those in major journals such as Science and JAMA. And the institutional access that many top scientists enjoy is not guaranteed—even institutions such as Harvard have considered canceling their subscriptions because they could no longer afford the escalating prices of major journal subscriptions.

It’s remarkable to find scientific research from 1960 hidden behind publisher paywalls. Thankfully, some publishers have made older articles available in full online, so that you can read them, even though it may still be illegal to copy and distribute them. In addition, some older articles have been made available on third party websites, but this is not a stable solution for providing reliable access to science. Third party postings can be difficult to find or taken down, links can get broken, and would-be posters may be deterred by the risk of a lawsuit. Under the pre-1978 copyright term, all of this history would be free to scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

Not all scientific publishers work under this kind of copyright scheme. “Open Access” scientific publications, like those of the Public Library of Science, are under Creative Commons licenses, meaning that they can be copied freely from the day they are published.

Works from 1988!

Most of the works highlighted here are famous—that is why we included them. And if that fame meant that the work was still being exploited commercially 28 years after its publication, the rights holders would probably renew the copyright. But we know from empirical studies that 85% of authors did not renew their copyrights (for books, the number is even higher—93% did not renew), since most works exhaust their commercial value very quickly.

Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Up to 85% of all copyrighted works from 1988 might have been entering the public domain on January 1, 2017.

That means that all of these examples from 1960 are only the tip of the iceberg. If the pre-1978 laws were still in effect, we could have seen 85% of the works published in 1988 enter the public domain on January 1, 2017. Imagine what that would mean to our archives, our libraries, our schools and our culture. Such works could be digitized, preserved, and made available for education, for research, for future creators. Instead, they will remain under copyright for decades to come, perhaps even into the next century.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the current copyright term is that in most cases, the cultural harm is not offset by any benefit to an author or rights holder. Unlike the famous works highlighted here, the vast majority of works from 1960 do not retain commercial value,5 but they are presumably off limits to users who do not want to risk a copyright lawsuit. This means that no one is benefiting from continued copyright, while the works remain both commercially unavailable and culturally off limits. The public loses the possibility of meaningful access for no good reason. You can read more about the current costs associated with orphan works—works that are still presumably under copyright, but with no identifiable or locatable copyright holder—here and here. Importantly, the US Copyright Office has been engaged in efforts to find solutions to the orphan works problem. However, unlike other countries, the US has not enacted any such solutions.

Creative Commons LicenseThe Public Domain Day 2017 web pages by Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

PhoenixBTV live TV gridPhoenixBTV launched earlier this month, offering a beta of 22 Phoenix area over-the-air TV channels via its Android and iPhone apps, but only for registered viewers physically present in the Phoenix market. Last week, the company added a web site to watch via browser. Freed from device-level location checking, PCs with a Phoenix VPN can tune in to see exactly what PhoenixBTV is serving up.

As you can see by my screenshot (click it to enlarge), PhoenixBTV came up with a pretty decent interface and grid, although some of the program info isn’t accurate. I’m surprised that it lets viewers examine shows over a week in advance; does it mean a cloud DVR is coming, or do they think viewers will find appointment viewing in the future?

Although the lineup is heavy on shopping, Spanish-language, and religious programming, there are a few channels that might interest secular English speakers. Independent KAZT leads off with daytime paternity-type talk shows, prime time game shows and nighttime sitcoms. There are the movies of ThisTV, plus old Luken Communications favorites Retro TV, REV’N, and Tuff TV, which Luken helped launch but doesn’t own any more. Okay, that’s only five channels, but what do you want for a free beta?

I’ve whipped up a TitanTV channel lineup that shows almost all of PhoenixBTV’s offerings. (It’s missing KPHE6 44.6.) To see that lineup, create an account or log in to TitanTV.com, click the tool bag (next to the plus sign) to manage channel lineups, click the Create Lineup from Token button, then in the copy and paste this token: 7MxSYp7G5dlpSHgggcXn4GwPmzFADnGfTKzFbZ2JAti!LJvfdrlGNA and click Save.

As I wrote last time, I hope that PhoenixBTV has its programming permissions in order. For now at least, anyone with a computer in the Phoenix area can go check it out.

TV Technology magazine ran a nice article last week about the latest place to admire tons of old broadcast TV technology. The Texas Museum of Broadcasting and Communications opened in September, but I first noticed it from that article.

Chuck Conrad, a serious collector of old equipment, bought a vacant former automobile dealership building in Kilgore TX to house all of his stuff and show it off to the public. There are about 70 TV cameras in Conrad’s collection, with about 40 on display. There are hundreds of other broadcasting pieces, from microphones to an early radio automation system and everything in between. “Then there are the radios and TVs,” Conrad told TV Technology. “We’ve never really counted them, but there are a lot, with many more in storage, just waiting their turn to go on display.”

The crowning glory and “tipping point” in the collection is a restored 1949 DuMont Telecruiser loaded with equipment from the first TV station in Texas. After spending years restoring that bus-like vehicle, Conrad just had to create a museum for it.

Last year, The Texas Bucket List featured the TMBC before it formally opened. I’m glad to be able to share that with you. Next time I’m in Kilgore, I definitely need to visit!

fubo2017 channel lineup chart

Tentative channel lineups for fuboTV’s 2017 packages. (Click to see full size)

I often mention my First Rule of TV Programming: Every channel, no matter what its original topic or theme, becomes like every other channel. SyFy adds pro wrestling. MTV turns away from music. GSN picks up reality shows. Et cetera. If the Chess Channel launched today, two years later it would carry sitcoms. (The only exception to this rule is Turner Classic Movies. Please don’t ever change, TCM.)

It looks like I’ll need to add a corollary to that rule: Every over-the-top multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) will become like every other MVPD. First KlowdTV started with a quirky set of channels then morphed under new management to embrace conservative news networks. Now fuboTV has announced that its soccer-centric offerings, starting at $10/month, will give way to a broad set of national channels that will cost over three times as much.

As it exists in 2016, fuboTV makes a great OTT supplement to free broadcast TV for soccer fans, even moreso for Spanish-language soccer fans. (Quick disclaimer: fuboTV advertises on FreeTVBlog and its sister web sites, but I pay for my own subscription.) The current base package includes beIN Sports, One World Sports, Univision Desportes and a half dozen interesting channels for that $9.95 base price. Gol TV and TyC Sports are part of a $4 add-on package. I can’t imagine a better solution for the soccer fan on a budget.

Yesterday, fuboTV announced that it will offer over 30 general interest channels plus plenty of sports for an introductory price of $34.95/month. That will go up to $50/month “in about 12 months” according to an article in Multichannel News. There’s still an emphasis on sports, but it’s hard to tell how it’s much different from DirecTV Now except for fewer channels and a lot less marketing clout. The 2017 fuboTV is also a close match to Sling TV Blue plus Sports Extra, a combination that’s also $35/month, again without the visibility of a top-five MVPD.

David Gandler, fuboTV’s CEO and co-founder, told Multichannel News that his current audience is 55% Hispanic, and that his new service will find a different audience than his cable-substitute OTT competitors. “There will be a learning curve over the next 24 to 36 months as we get a sense of who are customers are,” Gandler said.

According to that article, “fuboTV plans to sunset its current $9.99 per month service and incent current subscribers in the coming weeks and months to sign up for the new, fuller version of fuboTV.” I reached out for clarification, and was told via email that “All legacy plans will remain. However, you will not be able to sign up for a new one once the new product launches.”

The take-home message here is that if fuboTV sounds at all interesting to you, now is the time to subscribe to the basic service while it’s still around. You can watch on your phone, your tablet, and most TV streaming devices such as Roku and Apple TV. There’s no contract or long-term commitment, and there’s a 24-hour free trial. fuboTV includes a cloud-based DVR for time-shifting live matches from other lands or any other show you want to watch later. If we subscribers are going to get incentives to upgrade next year, that might be worth something too. I’m not being too selfish when I suggest that you really should check it out!