Judge rules against broadcasters, denying injunction against Aereo TV

Broadcasters lost the preliminary round, despite showing "irreparable harm."

Read the whole story

 

[aroni125]

How inefficient is it to capture, transcode, and stream programs off of antenna for customers?

I'm not actually sure "transcoding" is necessary.

"Just" wrapping the raw bits you received should do. No?

Plus:
This is something I've wanted to do with radio.
15x RadioShark-like devices running full tilt and a music-lookup service -> pretty much any song you want to listen to -EVAR- is rerecorded via the 'timeshifting' bits that allowed the original VCRs to fly.

"I recorded it for -me-, and I just haven't listened to this particular instance yet."

Transcoding is necessary as the antenna signal is analog, not digital. It has to translate from NTSC or PAL analog format to a digital format so it has bits that can be transmitted via the Internet.

 

[aroni125]

How inefficient is it to capture, transcode, and stream programs off of antenna for customers?

I'm not actually sure "transcoding" is necessary.

"Just" wrapping the raw bits you received should do. No?

Plus:
This is something I've wanted to do with radio.
15x RadioShark-like devices running full tilt and a music-lookup service -> pretty much any song you want to listen to -EVAR- is rerecorded via the 'timeshifting' bits that allowed the original VCRs to fly.

"I recorded it for -me-, and I just haven't listened to this particular instance yet."

Transcoding is necessary as the antenna signal is analog, not digital. It has to translate from NTSC or PAL analog format to a digital format so it has bits that can be transmitted via the Internet.

Over the air broadcasts haven't been analog in the US for some time.

Good point. It would depend on how their system works, then, whether it's converted back to an analog signal or not. ATSC is what is used for digital over-the-air; it is possible a consumer's device could understand it, but it could possibily be transcoded into a different format, especially if they wanted to avoid licensing issues. (ATSC uses MPEG-2 and AC-3)