by ·Comments Off on Another company tries steaming OTA TV

TV Freedom picture from BamBoomHoo boy! Still another company is trying to solve the impenetrable problem of streaming live over-the-air TV to computers and mobile devices, legally.

The latest contender is Bamboom, which has worked out yet another permutation. It uses really tiny over-the-air antennas, “hundreds of thousands of them in a small space in a secure location” in a given city. Each subscriber gets an exclusive connection to one of those antennas to watch TV through the internet.

Two factors in favor of Bamboom’s survival: Only viewers in the same TV market will be allowed to watch, and it has a war chest of $4.5 million from investors. It will need that war chest because of the one huge factor that weighs against Bamboom and anyone else who tries to find a way around negotiating with OTA broadcasters – the huge corporations which own the networks and TV stations will sue or legislate it out of existence.

I haven’t checked to see whether someone from New York will be able to watch his local stations while visiting somewhere else, because it’s just a matter of time before someone gets a restraining order to shut down Bamboom. Considering FilmOn‘s history, that could be a month or less.

You see, there’s already a way to do all this. The big cable and pay-TV satellite companies are rolling out internet streaming of live TV, but only for their customers. So if you want to watch local TV on your computer, you just pay one of these providers, who turn around and pay retransmission fees to the local broadcaster. With all that money at stake, our corporate oligarchy will slap down anyone who tries to get around the system.

But just maybe, there might be one way out. With the support of the consumer electronics industry, the FCC is squeezing local TV broadcasters to free more bandwidth to be used for mobile internet access. The broadcasters are fighting back, but with the mobile communications companies against them, the outcome is completely uncertain.

Here’s my proposal for a deal between the internet/consumer electronics folks and the TV broadcasters. Local TV stations keep their spectrum, but in exchange, broadcasters agree to a standard royalty that any company could pay to stream OTA channels over the internet. Then the broadcasters could keep milking their cash cows, and viewers could choose from Bamboom, FilmOn, ivi.tv, or any other internet delivery system. How does that sound?

* You gotta love the folks at FilmOn. Even though it pretty much failed in its original idea to stream OTA channels, FilmOn has patched together a decent lineup of oddball channels for a decent price. But back when the networks sued to block FilmOn from streaming their content, founder Alki David and some friends sued CNET, a subsidiary of CBS, for facilitating “massive copyright infringement”. Because CNET had published stories about how peer-to-peer file sharing worked. Anyway, the judge in that case pressed David et al to detail exactly what copyrights were infringed. This week, the answer came: one movie and five songs.

* A couple of weeks ago, my favorite streaming service, ivi.tv, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FCC for all papers relating to ivi.tv and Commissioner Meredith Baker, who is leaving the FCC to join Comcast, whose merger with NBC she voted for in January. Meanwhile, ivi’s lineup has shrunk to two free channels as it fights to for the legal right to stream the marvelous banquet of OTA channels it used to provide. I’d really love to see ivi pick up some more freely available channels (NASA, Classic Arts Showcase, etc.), but what do you want for nothing?

by ·1 Comment

Sam Vasisht writes at Online Video Insider that Google TV and Apple TV were wrong to include “TV” in the name of their services. That statement is far from obvious, but Vasisht makes a good case for his theory. So go read it.

by ·1 Comment
Erwin G. Krasnow

Erwin G. Krasnow

There was a scary report issued this week by Erwin Krasnow, who is a former NAB General Counsel (according to Broadcasting & Cable’s John Eggerton) and/or former FCC General Counsel (according to AllAccess.com). In an opinion piece (PDF) released by the DC-based The Media Institute, Krasnow calls on the FCC to “(r)enounce the discredited concept of public ownership of the airwaves”.

(Important Aside: By an odd coincidence, I’ve been reading one of Krasnow’s books off and on for a few months. Profitably Buying and Selling Broadcast Stations seems to be an excellent guide for dealing with contracts and other necessary details as you’re working out a deal on a station. It’s also as dry as burnt toast. I’d love to have Krasnow in my corner should I ever negotiate a purchase. And I believe that my use of his promotional photo from his page on his firm’s site constitutes Fair Use. Please don’t hurt me, oh mighty lawyers!)

In particular, the paper seems to want to disprove FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who said that “using the public airwaves is a privilege — a lucrative one and I fear that the FCC has not done enough to stand up for the public interest.” Quoting Ayn Rand and Dean Rusk, Krasnow builds an excellent prima facie case that claiming public ownership, and thereby inviting public regulation, is as absurd as requiring a license to use sunlight to grow crops.

But the paper gives little attention to the real problem: You can’t just stick an antenna on your roof and start broadcasting. It’s true that new technologies (such as blogs) give us alternatives, but that’s not the point. No other communication medium is as ubiquitous as over-the-air TV and radio. The number of simultaneous channels in any given location really is finite. Each broadcast station effectively prevents any number of possible competing stations from being heard by the thousands or millions of receivers within range. That’s why the public deserves a seat at the table as we discuss what responsibilities are included in each broadcast license.

by ·1 Comment

End of Satellite title cardAs I walked the exhibit floors of the NAB Show this week, I asked dozens of people the same question: Is IP-based TV delivery shrinking the satellite TV market? Or will it soon? Except for a few satellite folks who ventured that it’ll probably shrink it one of these days, everyone agreed that it has, and that IP is hitting satellite even faster than had been expected.

One case in point is PBS, which announced in late March that it was in the process of switching to IP file-based delivery for its non-real-time programming. And then there’s the demonstration project from the folks at Ryerson University that you can transmit live 1080p, 30 fps HD video from New Zealand to Toronto … as long as you have internet2-quality, university-grade fat data pipes. In what must be an understatement, the Ryerson professors told me, “The television networks are very interested in this.”

The reason for the change is money. Satellites are very, very expensive. It costs millions to launch one, and if it makes it successfully into the right orbit, it’ll only last for an average of a decade or so. During that time, the only way to recoup those millions is to rent slices of transponder time, and that’s why it costs so much to use satellites to distribute programming. Anything IP-based is bound to save distributors a lot of money, as long as it works.

There are several markets for transponder time. One is for program originators such as PBS to distribute to their broadcasters. Another is for companies who send their signals to homes with dishes. (Yet another is for beaming news stories back to stations. I saw a lot of nascent IP-based alternatives promoted at the show, so that’s changing too.)

At the Akamai booth, I was chatting with Pete Condon, a senior service line manager, and I said that the unexpected speed of adoption of over-the-top TV to homes reminded me of the switch from vinyl records to CDs. Pete said this switch would go even faster. “This time,” he said, “everyone already has the player.” It took years for the CD infrastructure to become ubiquitous, but most households already have the internet.

But most is not all. Some folks don’t have any internet access at home, and even more don’t have broadband, and that’s one of the caveats here. In areas such as South America where there is little broadband penetration in homes, satellite remains an attractive option. It’s also still the best way to distribute live programming, such as sports and news, so satellite distribution probably won’t go away completely for a long time. But for now, watch as fewer signals are beamed up to the sky and more are relayed through the cloud.

by ·1 Comment

NAB Public Service bannerHere at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, the hottest topic is the FCC’s desire to take away some TV channel space and convert it to wireless internet spectrum. That would be good for a future of ubiquitous internet access, but not so good for the bumped stations and their viewers.

In defending their position, various NAB spokesmen bring up the same arguments. Broadcasters serve their local audiences in times of emergency. They provide local weather, news, and community support in a way no national network or web service can.

There’s nothing wrong with those points, but I’m surprised that I never hear the most compelling reason to keep OTA stations on the air: They serve people who can’t afford to pay for TV.

Imagine a working mom just barely scraping by. You want her kids to have educational programming to help them succeed in school. You want her to be able to relax when she has an hour off to watch something entertaining and diverting. You don’t want to make her pay $50/month for basic cable or satellite TV.

I wonder why no one at the NAB talks about this great public service to the needy. Could it be that some people believe that anyone without enough cash doesn’t deserve TV? There must be some reason, but I just don’t know what it is.

In my next post tomorrow evening, I’ll talk about the Big Question of the future of satellite TV. See you then.