27 June, 2014

Welcome to News Views, CASBAA’s news round-up culled from sources across the industry for the week ending June 27th. Curated by CASBAA, News Views keeps you in the loop. We always value your feedback, so tell us what you think!

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Christopher Slaughter CEO	So the other shoe has finally dropped: Aereo has lost its fight in the US Supreme Court. Naturally, the decision was welcomed by broadcasters, and just as naturally condemned by Aereo. And of course, the ruling has also prompted plenty of musing about its effect on the TV industry, the need for broadcasters to embrace innovation, possible repercussions for other cloud-based services, and, finally, what Aereo will do next.
John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer	The Aereo decision is interesting and possible relevant to our concerns in Asia, too. The U.S. Supreme Court came to the opposite decision from the Singapore courts (in the 2010 Record TV case), which held that free-to-air broadcasts could be freely redistributed over the internet without any copyright violation. By contrast, courts in Japan (Maneki TV case) and Australia (Optus TV Now case) have sided with content owners and said internet redistribution of free-to-air content requires an agreed redistribution contract. We’re also aware of shady services that have pretended to have antenna farms for DTH pay-TV broadcasts, so they could relay “an individual’s own signal” to them, via the internet. Somehow nobody could ever find the antenna farms…….maybe, like Aereo, these guys had developed a mini-satellite-dish-on-a-chip? It seems more likely that the “antenna farm” legal fiction was a cover to deceive consumers and deter lawsuits.
Michael Steel Regulatory Assistant	Hong Kong’s Customs police scored a serious goal last week by breaking up a piracy ring that was stealing pay-TV signals and uploading them to the “black box” server (in China) for the “Maige” pirate TV service. Multiple locations were raided and a series of arrests were made; we’re now waiting to see who gets charged with what by the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, CASBAA took the opportunity to try to warn consumers that if they buy a pirate TV box, they could find themselves with dead boxes, as those who paid Maige apparently now have.
Godfrey Chan Marketing & Member Relations Executive	Quote of the Week: Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell on the Aereo decision: “Any business plan, whether it’s Aereo’s or someone else’s,” he said, “that’s premised on taking someone else’s intellectual property without their permission and reselling it is probably not one to bank on.”
Jane Buckthought Advertising Consultant	TV everywhere is driving viewing as a new Viacom study has found but measurement is a whole other story.
Desmond Chung Associate Director, PR & Communications	Is this the chomp of infamy? Proving the viral potency of a dirty bite, not only has Luis Suarez’s love nibble on Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini made the World Cup top of mind to even non-footie fans around the world but has proved a boon to marketers as well. Now that’s something to sink your teeth into!
Sara Madera Director, Member Relations & Marketing	Recent deployments of LTE Broadcast technology have been getting a lot of attention lately, with news that Korean carrier LG U+ is launching an LTE-based VOD service, coming just a few weeks after Orange debuted a live demo at the French Open, and Verizon in the US rolled out a test of LTE Multicast at the Indianapolis 500. The mobile industry is bullish on the prospects for LTE Broadcast, although some point out that the mobile operators have their work cut out for them learning the media game.
Christopher Slaughter CEO	The truth sometimes hurts, especially when it comes to audience behaviour. From The Atlantic: Audiences are liars, and the media organizations who listen to them without measuring them are dupes.
John Medeiros Chief Policy Officer	The US Cable Industry and energy efficiency advocates have taken issue with an LA Times report last week that distorted facts about energy consumption of cable boxes. Here’s the joint Letter to the Editor by the groups, which together negotiated a voluntary agreement to make set-top boxes more efficient. The Consumer Electronics Association complained about “serious factual errors and misleading implications in the Los Angeles Times article,” and here’s an NCTA.com blog post giving some additional views.
Anjan Mitra Executive Director, India	In India, there are big differences of view over the progress of digitization: is the glass half empty, or is it half full? Some observers have taken to bashing the bureaucracy because the glass is not full enough, but News Broadcasters Association President Narayan Rao says in this commentary that blaming the I&B Ministry (or the TRAI) is unfair: “We currently have some highly efficient officials at the I&B Ministry who have shown a lot of understanding of our issues and have tried to do all they can to solve them.”