[mythtv-users] Terrestrial Television, Aereo and MythTV

[Gary Buhrmaster]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Chuck Peters <cp at ccil.org> wrote:
>
> This morning the CEO said ...

Take nothing a CEO says on a public program as accurate.
Their first (and perhaps only) jobs are that of chief cheerleader
and prime salesperson.

....

> If my understanding of this is correct, a mythtv user could setup a bunch of
> these small antenna's and distribute the over the air recordings within an
> area where the TV station broadcasts.  Have any ham radio people and mythtv
> developers, or other projects, discussed doing something like this?

Note that Aereo does not record anything itself (and that is the
basis of their claim to not infringe), but just sends the bits
received by the antennae immediately to users (the bits are
sent to (user specific) file-servers in the cloud, which means
Aereo is not doing the recording; that is their story, and they
are sticking to it).  To do it on scale (uplinks of a dozen
megabits/second for each concurrent user should one host a
small farm of those nano-antennas), would cost real money for
infrastructure.  And then there is the legal question.

See the results of a lookalike/copycat service called Aereokiller.
It was shut down due to a different legal interpretation(*).  If you
have the deep pockets to properly fight this case all the way
to the supreme court, please proceed, but we do not want
"bad law" to come out of an inadequately funded position
(which happens if you do not have deep enough pockets).

Gary

(*) Because of the differing decisions between Aereokiller
and Aereo, this issue will likely (eventually) make its way
upstream.  At great expense in legal teams to make your
case.