The big 4 Cable/Sat/Internet companies do it again
Locast, a service offered by a non profit, run by a former FCC legal advisor (under Obama era) has temporarily suspended operations.
I was using Locast to get a nice mix of live local channels and a bunch of other standard over the air broadcasts that I otherwise couldn’t stream on my home TV. Due to the large trees around my home, digital TV signals don’t really get there, nor do cell phones.
The big 4 cable internet/TV companies sued the Sports Fans Coalition (who operates Locast), claiming that their periodic interruption of the programming and asking for a donation every 15 minutes was actually a paid service and thus they could not operate as a non profit. The whole reason they were operating as a non profit is that the same big 4 cable companies lobbied the FCC to make it illegal for local TV to be streamed unless you have a distribution contract in place with every channel that is broadcast. Perhaps you read the blurbs and say, no it wasn’t the internet companies, it was CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC. Who owns them? Yup, the internet companies. There is this concept of “carriage fee”, in which you must pay the production facility to “carriage” the signal, unless the signal is broadcast over the air. How warped and twisted is that?
In a nutshell, it is illegal for a third party to acquire a signal (over the air) that you have the right to receive for free over the air, and transmit it to you for profit. Unless of course, that person is the big 4. Then it’s fine.
Link to a financial news article about the saga
This is an example of why we need open access, and FCC oversight that doesn’t have their hands in the coffers of the big 4. (looking at you Ajit Pai). Currently the FCC is under interim leadership, but many of the policies “Crafted” during the 2017-2021 period are still in full effect.
This morning I had to do a “support” call for my wife. She was upset that “something is broken with the TV”, “America’s Test Kitchen” wasn’t working. Turns out, she has been watching in on Locast. This one really hurts; she picked up a lot of fun recipes and tried them on us.