Really, Really Small Antennas May Save Local TV

You may find that there is no breach of copyright as the retransmission is a simulcast in the same market area.

Simulcast or not, the challenge is usually they don't want anyone monetizing their content that is received for free, without paying some kind of fee back to the station.

There were direct legal challenges previously to a service that took an OTA broadcast and retransmitted it via web streaming. The difference in the Aereo approach is it's 1:1. There's an antenna/receiver for every subscriber, instead of using one receiver and retransmitting it to N places.

Aereo may still get challenged since they are monetizing the feeds, but I think the trackable feature is big and might satisfy stations who are looking for demographics.

From the NY Times article I cited in the post:

Nonetheless, the company is bracing for possible legal challenges from TV stations. "We understand that when you try to take something meaningful on, you have to be prepared for challenges," Mr. Kanojia said.

The major stations in New York declined to comment.

Last year, a service called Ivi TV tried to redistribute broadcast television signals on the Internet, but it was stopped by a federal judge in New York after broadcasters and content providers sued, saying the company was effectively stealing their signals and work. The service is appealing that ruling. Aereo says that by setting up antenna arrays, it is wholly different.

Mobile gadgets drive me nuts. The latest thing (now active in the UK) is payment via mobile phone. Where will this end. I can live with a phone that does just that, and possibly a 'smart card', but mixing all this stuff up sounds like a security blah blah nightmare. I've witnessed plenty of times where local cell network has crashed. Tweeting and all that blathering nionsense is flooding capacity. It's inevitable we go this way, but one more step toward setting ourselves up for a crash. Cyberwar will leave us in the ditch long before any bomb. Just my Sunday 2 cents.

We're retrained an entire generation to be mobile/digital/social. There's no "there" to go back to. Wired landline phones are disappearing fast. Postal services are under fire big time. Libraries are struggling.

There's also the angle of BYOD and enterprise security. It's successful under controlled conditions with certain types of workflow. In other areas, there are huge security concerns.

We're also retraining people on a whole new approach to social and connected TV, which is what this post is about. Again, the old model is under fire and people can't make money the way they used to. Exactly why the Aereo idea is of interest - it's a new biz model that can directly reinforce the existing one.

I do agree, if all this blindly goes online without the right security measures, it's a wide open game. I do a lot of work with the smart grid and mHealth guys, it's priority 1 in those fields. I'm not sure other industries have the same view of things yet.

That first paragraph (especially, the rest are good too) is so true. I agree that there is no 'going back', this will all come to be. All points mentioned are happening in Blighty.

I'm not overly nostalgic, but something about it all makes me wonder. Ask a youngster to sort a problem and they are IT savvy enough to do it. Confound them with researching in a library, or handwriting a letter, and they are lost. The concept of manual labour is disappering. When the internet goes pear-shaped, where shall we be? I'm no ludite, but wonder where are we headed. Basic skills are being lost.

A most thought provoking post, dondingee. It's weekend, so I won't dwell to much on it. All same, a very interesting topic to consider.

As someone who's been building, stringing and mounting antennas as high as I could for many decades to receive a decent signal, I wonder what the ambient field strength has to be to allow such an inefficient antenna to do it's job. It seems like smoking-- those old enough will recall the advertisements depicting a 'doctor' with the caption: DOCTORS SMOKE COOLS telling us that it WAS safe to inhale nicotine and 10,000 other trace chemicals.

Maybe in the future, enough information will be available to convince us that any exposure to the electromagnetic spectrum energy will at some level be harmfull, the question is: at what level?

There are current federal parameters but set at levels that will cause excess heating of a body like in a microwave cooker! How about the much lower levels??