Copyright law is so crazy that seemingly the only way you can get away with building a streaming TV service is by using thousands of tiny antennas, like Aereo did. (It sounds crazy, but Aereo was built around a 2008 legal decision. Seriously.) And it’s driving the TV networks insane that this technology can even exist. But it’s not going away anytime soon: They won a big legal victory today, with an appeals court denying a preliminary injunction to shut the service down. Next step? They’re going to trial.
Watch the 2012 Shorty Awards tomorrow night (7:30-9pm), live from TheTimesCenter in New York!
Cheer Missing e on as it, hopefully, brings home a Shorty Award, in addition to the Shorty Vox Populi (based on popular vote) you already helped to win!
SFB editor Ernie Smith will be there too in hopes of the site winning a “Microblog of the Year on Tumblr” honor. We totally expect “We Are the 99 Percent” to kick our butt, but that doesn’t mean we won’t totally be freaking out in case we win. Watch tomorrow and cheer us on!
Why can’t you listen to “El Camino” on Spotify? There are a lot of reasons why The Black Keys’ discography ends with “Brothers” on the service, and it’s not because “Tighten Up” is the best song they’ve ever done. Really, the problems here are ethical. As an idea, the concept of subscription-based music has been around for years — remember Columbia House? or how about eMusic? — and in a lot of ways, Spotify and MOG and Rdio are merely the latest generation of that. But The Verge’s Paul Miller touches a solid nerve with a single sentence: “I suppose what I really want is some sort of ‘free range’ sticker slapped on my music consumption, so that I know the artist was ethically treated in this transaction.” Here’s a breakdown of the issues involved here.
» But is that actually the case? Small-scale bands probably have less to lose in terms of cannibalization, but in a change from the iTunes era, it’s the biggest bands on the planet, not the ones with legacies to protect, that are protesting the services. One Universal Records exec, Rob Wells, says that the artists have nothing to worry about: “Every single one of those bands has earned more money from its album being on Spotify than it has from being on any other services within a period of time.” But try explaining that to Patrick Carney, the drummer for the Black Keys: “For a band that makes a living selling music, it’s not at a point where it’s feasible for us.” For what it’s worth, Spotify and its ilk are working hard on discovery these days.
ABC-7 News in the Bay Area is providing an aerial livestream of the Occupy Oakland protests and march. It’s pretty engrossing, you should most definitely check it out — and hats off to the helicopter pilots working hard to get this quality (and socially important) footage.
They may be about to lose “Toy Story 3” thanks to the bungled Starz deal, but they’re going to get “Shrek” in its place. It’s the first time a streaming service has beat out a major pay-cable network for a movie studio deal.
In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success. We have done very well for a long time by steadily improving our service, without doing much CEO communication. Inside Netflix I say, ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ and we should just keep improving our service. But now I see that given the huge changes we have been recently making, I should have personally given a full justification to our members of why we are separating DVD and streaming, and charging for both. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.Netflix CEO Reed Hastings • In a lengthy apology he wrote on the Netflix blog. Let’s repeat that first sentence again: “In hindsight, I slid into arrogance based upon past success.” That sounds like a quote for the ages, the famous last words for many a company.
Fox has become the first broadcast network to require people who want to go online — at sites such as Hulu — and watch programs immediately after they’re broadcast to prove they already pay for a cable or satellite service, Ben Fritz reports.
Photo: Actor Hugh Laurie in the Fox TV series “House.” Credit: Adam Taylor / Fox
Today in things that totally suck and will backfire and ensure a steady stream of BitTorrent action.
Spotify is coming to the U.S.: About freaking time. You can sign up over here.
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A conflict of interest on the side? One of the internet’s most popular movie review websites will now be owned by one of America’s major movie and entertainment studios. The acquisition has less to do with Rotten Tomatoes, however, than it does Flixster, a movie review/streaming company that counted RT as one of its subsidiaries — Warner Bros. wanted Flixster to push a competitive advantage against Netflix, and their new ownership of the widely-known review aggregator is a byproduct of that. So, if Warner Bros. makes a piece of utter dreck, hopefully you’ll still be able to see that not-so-fresh “tomatometer” rating. source
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