The local broadcasters / network affiliates do need to maintain a viable business model to serve the public interest. Their real value to the public is the local news/weather programming they produce which plays an important role in public safety. It's very arguable that a company like Areo disrupting this model serves the public interest at this point. We need local news/weather, emergency weather alerts, school/road closings, etc way more than we need it to be easier to watch re-runs of Wheel of Fortune via Areo.
How did they make their money before cable existed and we got into this retransmission mess? Nobody was paying them for the content received over-the-air.
(I think the answer is advertisements, but I'm open to other possibilities.)
Yep it was mostly local advertising. The biggest problem for local broadcasters is their costs for have gone up dramatically while viewership has declined. Bad mix.
So how many iterations or higher courts or lower courts and judgements and how much time and money is going to be wasted until Aero and Broadcasters are allowed speak in frank terms about who owns the analytics inherent to a broadcast instead all this wrangling over whether Aero as a platform and technology is allowed to exist?
Or is that just "the price of doing innovation" or "market forces" at work?
