A $795M analogy: Locast, broadcast copyright, and the fall of big antenna
What infuriates me the most about this ruling is that long term effects of it.  Locast did what they did and inserted ads every 15 minutes because they knew nobody would not contribute to hosting costs without some reason.  Had they made it so it was interruption at the start only, _maybe_ it could have held up better in court.  And I agree on that front.  Remove the donate video from showing every 15 minutes, and only show it at the start.  Encourage funding through better on screen messages and make it more clear that it&#x27;s voluntary.<p>But the big part of the ruling was that it wasn&#x27;t just how they requested funding, but the why.  The ruling argued that collecting funds to expand more throughout the US was not valid for their non-profit status for some reason that made no sense.  And as a result, it appears that a replacement will never exist, because the cost of pulling all of these channels with careful and specific antenna placement in a city, the hardware to pull all of those channels in real time, re-encoding the feed from MPEG2 to HLS&#x2F;MP4 for the web, potentially making different qualities to account for network conditions (can&#x27;t remember if the M3U8 playlists from Locast did that or not), and the networking costs of transmitting video are expensive.<p>And the lawsuit was stupid too.  US TV channels are crammed to the max with advertisements, so much so that it feels more like an ad delivery mechanism than an entertainment delivery system.  Locast could have been advantageous as they would have actual data of who is watching what when and where.  Ad companies love that data, and with traditional OTA feeds, they don&#x27;t have that.  Instead, all of these OTA companies actively refuse offering the ability to watch their streams online for free.  Other than local news content, everything else is locked behind a paywall of having an active cable subscription.  Why should I, as a consumer, pay $100 a month to watch this same OTA content, just so I can watch it online, especially for a medium so jam packed with ads?<p>I live in the edge of Columbus, Ohio in an apartment.  I&#x27;m still within 10 miles of the transmitters for the big 6 stations (the local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, CW, and PBS collectively only use 4 transmitters.). My apartment is luckily facing sort of line of site to most of those transmitters.  But even then, I still have bad signal issues with those channels, and in some cases leading to an unwatchable recording.  The signal was bad enough that my recording of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Opening Ceremonies was bared by loss of 2 to 5 seconds of video and audio every 2 minutes.  My only alternative was to play $65 to $100 a month to cable or cordcutting subscription to watch that broadcast online.  And out of spite for continuing to shutdown any free way to watch their OTA content online, I will _never_ pay.  Our laws regarding OTA broadcasts and how people can use and view them need to change ASAP, otherwise what is the point of having them if is not accessible to all.