Comcast Lost $914 Million On Its New Streaming Service Last Year

from the new-to-this-whole-competition-thing dept

Despite bottomless pockets and all but owning state and federal regulators for the last four years, telecom continues to stumble with adaptation in the streaming video era. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new media brand fell flat on its face. AT&T's plan to spend $200 billion on the Time Warner and DirecTV mergers to dominate the television space has resulted in them losing 8 million pay TV subscribers in just the last four years. In short, pampered telecom monopolies aren't finding that getting ahead in more competitive markets to be particularly easy.

Comcast too isn't having a great time of it, despite dumping the company's resources into its new Peacock streaming platform. A new filing this week indicates that Comcast lost $914 million on the venture just last year alone. Some of these losses were expected as Comcast shuffles resources around NBC Universal, pours money into new projects, and streamlines the company's overall structure, but it's worth noting that Comcast remains somewhat cagey about how many paying customers are actually signed up:

"Comcast said Peacock had 33 million signups in the U.S. at year-end but hasn’t provided metrics on how many of those are paying subscribers. The service, available in free and premium subscription tiers, launched for Comcast cable subscribers last April and went nationwide in July 2020."

Comcast, like other giants, had hoped to elbow in on streaming and advertising by locking its NBC properties (like "Friends") behind its gatekeeper paywall. Comcast also enjoys the fact that it effectively lobbied to lobotomize the FCC, leaving it free to do things like use unnecessary broadband caps as a competitive bludgeon against other streaming providers. But even that wasn't enough to seriously threaten giants like Disney, which (thanks in large part to its Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel catalog) just crossed the 100 million paying subscriber mark.

While Comcast expects that Peacock might break even by 2025 or so, the relentless drumbeat of deep-pocketed competitors jumping into the space means that's certainly no guarantee.

Don't be too sad for Comcast, however. As always, the company's steadily growing broadband monopoly means that as it loses TV revenue (from folks cutting the cord on expensive, traditional television), it can simply jack up prices on broadband to recoup the losses. Right now, that's coming in the form of unnecessary, bullshit broadband usage caps, but when your subscribers literally can't flee because there are no other real options to flee to, the sky's the limit.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, peacock, streaming
Companies: comcast, nbc

Stadia Fallout: Nobody Can Address Stadia Games' Bugs Because Google Fired All The Developers

from the abandon-ship dept

More bad news for Stadia. We were just discussing Google's decision to axe its own game development studios. In and of itself, such a move to cut staff like this would be a worrying sign for the platform, especially given just how much growing interest there has been in video games and game-streaming surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. But when it's instead one more indication that Google isn't fully committed to its own platform, alongside the poor reception from the public and concerns about whether it can deliver the gaming experience it promised, these things tend to pile up on one another. I have attempted to drive home the point of just how important the development of trust with customers is for Stadia, given that those buying into the platform are gaming entirely at the pleasure of Google's desire to keep Stadia going.

And the hits to trust keep coming. In direct fallout from its decision to cut the development teams, Stadia customers are finding themselves unable to get support for Google's internally developed game.

One of the few games that Google actually owns — although it was released first on consoles and PC before making its Stadia debut — was Journey to the Savage Planet. Google acquired Typhon Studios before the end of 2019, and the deal meant that Journey to the Savage Planet was one of the few games that came free with the Stadia Pro subscription.

Typhon Studios was the first studio acquired by Google, but with the effective closure of Google’s gaming ambitions, the developers there were let go with everyone else. For users who are still playing on Stadia however — at least the ones who aren’t suing Google — that’s caused a bit of a problem, because there’s nobody around to fix their games.

And in the case of Journey to the Savage Planet, fixes are definitely needed. Crashes and glitches appear to be the normal experience for those playing the game. Still others report that the game regularly freezes at the start menu. Worse yet, it appears that some reporting these bugs are being told by Google reps that they are going to work with the now-axed developers to address their concerns.

Said axed-developers, however, are telling everyone that will listen that, no, they can't, because they were laid off.

Unable to play Journey in single-player or co-op, one user reached out to the game’s publisher, 505 Games. After being told by Stadia’s social team that they would work with the publisher on a fix, the publisher said: Actually, we can’t fix this for you at all.

“Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do from our end right now since all of the game code and data on Stadia is owned by Google,” 505’s support staffer said in an email.

In a follow-up a few days ago, another 505 Games support staffer suggested the user remind Google that, actually, Google are the ones responsible for publishing everything on Google Stadia.

There's literally no way for those now ex-Google employees to make fixes on games when the code resides on Google's systems. And if Google itself cannot fix the bugs, well, then the bugs go unfixed, full stop.

All of this comes as Stadia reps are telling people that more games are coming to the platform in a pitch to drive adoption of Stadia among the public. But given the experience that public has with Google's own game, it's hard to imagine many trusting the platform enough to buy in. This has all the earmarks of other abandoned Google projects in the past, where the company never seems to decide whether it is fully invested in the product or not. In the past, that has led to those projects withering on the vine. Why the public should expect something different out of Stadia is an open question.

Filed Under: games, journey to savage planet, stadia, streaming
Companies: google, typhon studios

Google Disbands Stadia Game Developers And Signals Potential For More Trouble Ahead

from the ruh-roh dept

It's no secret that in the year and a half since Google launched its video game streaming platform, Stadia, things haven't gone particularly well. Game developers were wary at the onset that Google, as it has with projects like this in the past, might simply one day shut the whole thing down if it thinks the venture is a loser. The launch of Stadia itself was mostly met with meager interest, due to scant games available on the platform. Even then, the rollout was a mix of chaos and glitch, critiques of its promise for true 4k game streaming, very low adoption rates, and some at the company appearing to want to go to war with game-streamers.

And now, there are signals that the trouble is worsening. Google recently announced, completely without warning, that it was shuttering its in-house Stadia game development studio.

According to the report, developers at the studio were "shocked" by the sudden shutdown, since, only a week earlier, Stadia's leading executive, game industry veteran Phil Harrison, told the group "[SG&E] has made great progress building a diverse and talented team and establishing a strong lineup of Stadia exclusive games." The one-week flip-flop was "part of an apparent pattern of Stadia leadership not being honest and upfront with the company's developers," according to Kotaku, adding that many developers "upended their lives and careers to join the team."

The report says Stadia's developers found out about the studio closure at "almost the same time as everyone else." Stadia's developers had to wait three days before Harrison was available for a Q&A conference call, which the report describes as "contentious." The most chilling line in the report details Harrison's response to a question asking why the Studio was "making great progress" one week and then fired the next: "When asked what changed from the week prior, Harrison admitted nothing had and told those on the call, 'We knew.'"

If that strikes you as fairly shitty, well, yes it is. And if it feels like a flavor of exactly what game developers originally feared -- Google's penchant for quickly bailing on hyped up projects -- well, yeah, it's that, too.

But while the plight of developers and Stadia employees is a very real and non-trivial thing, for Stadia to succeed, it needs the trust of its customers. Trust is particularly key for Stadia because, as we so often point out, gamers don't actually own the games they play on Stadia. They, instead, pay for access to the platform. So, with PC gaming as an option and the new generation of consoles now released, the public has to decide whether to go with Stadia or choose a traditional option. And when Google comes out with statements like the following, that trust feels quite hard to come by.

Google doesn't publicly share how well (or poorly) Stadia is doing, but that blog post mentions that Google is looking for "the best path to building Stadia into a long-term, sustainable business," strongly hinting that Stadia is not currently a sustainable business. The post details what sounds like a pretty strong change in strategy, pivoting from the direct-to-consumer "game console" business and more toward being a technology provider for gaming companies.

If Stadia was ever going to be successful, it seems like that should have happened over the last several months. The pandemic is making gaming more popular than ever, and everyone else's sales are up across the board. Stadia was also one of the best systems to play the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 on, especially given that the other best options were next-gen consoles that were perpetually sold out. If Google isn't seeing success now, it's hard to imagine a better opportunity for the service.

Which puts potential customers for Stadia in exactly the same place as the game developers that were fretting a year ago: if I game on Stadia, am I suddenly going to lose everything when Google decides to pull the plug?

Whatever else we might want to say for Stadia or the future of game streaming as a service, that question is the highest of hurdles.

Filed Under: stadia, streaming, video games
Companies: google

Karma: Twitch Replaces Live Metallica Concert With 8-Bit Music To Avoid Copyright Madness

from the napster-bad! dept

Long time copyright watchers know that Metallica sullied its reputation with tons of fans when it was the first band to sue the file sharing upstart Napster back in 2000 (and also sued three universities for "not blocking Napster"). The band's drummer, Lars Ulrich, became an outspoken critic of file sharing and the internet, the early face of super wealthy musicians whining about the internet changing the way they did things, leading to the classic Money Good! Napster Bad! meme.

Over the years, Metallica has tried to do more to "embrace" the internet, but almost every time, fans jump up to remind them about what assholes they were towards the early internet experience.

And that brings us around to Friday evening, when Metallica was set to play a streamed "live" show to kick off BlizzCon (an event for video game company Blizzard). The event was streamed live on Twitch, which has had some copyright problems of late. It appears that as Metallica was playing, and the Twitch Gaming channel was streaming the concert, someone realized that there might be a copyright problem. As first called out by Rod Breslau, the channel inserted 8-bit folks music over Metallica's live performance to avoid a situation that, uh, Metallica might sue over.

You can see a fun YouTube video of when the switch happens and it's as glorious as it is stupid:

Watching Lars "rock out" to 8-bit folk music... is really quite something:

As plenty of people pointed out, Metallica and Lars are a big part of the reason that the internet is so, well, twitchy, in trying to take down copyright-covered content these days, so this bit of idiocy demonstrating just how broken copyright is couldn't have happened to a more deserving group.

Filed Under: blizzcon, copyright, lars ulrich, licenses, metallica, music, streaming
Companies: twitch

FyreTV Porn Service Asks 11th Circuit Panel To Resurrect Dumb Trademark Suit Against Amazon Over FireTV

from the burning-sensation dept

Somehow we missed covering this in 2019, but in those much more innocent times the company behind FyreTV, which bills itself as a service that is "the Netflix of porn", sued Amazon over its Fire TV product. The claim by FyreTV's Wreal LLC ownership was that the public would be confused into thinking that Amazon was somehow behind its pornographic offerings, or that some affiliation between the two entities was in place. The claims rested on exactly what you'd expect, essentially that the two product names are phonetically identical and that both involve providing video-based entertainment. That the types of that entertainment are as wildly different as could possibly be apparently didn't concern Wreal LLC. Instead, they came to court with a couple of social media posts essentially poking fun at the similar names as though it were some kind of proof of confusion.

The court tossed the lawsuit in 2019, but Wreal LLC has now asked an 11th circuit panel to bring the suit back to life. To revive the suit, lawyers for Wreal LLC provided literally nothing new in its claims.

An attorney for Wreal told a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court Thursday morning that the potential for consumer confusion was obvious: “One just needs to hear the words ‘Fire TV.’ They sound exactly the same,” Carlos Nunez-Vivas of Waserstein & Nunez said.

According to FyreTV, Amazon throwing its name on Fire TV actually made the confusion worse instead of the opposite. The FyreTV argument for this is, apparently, that Amazon has a strong brand. And from there, the attorney argued that, hey, maybe someday FyreTV would like to get into non-pornographic content.

“They’re saturating the market. They’re spending eye-popping numbers in advertising,” he said, referring to Amazon. “Let’s say Wreal would’ve liked to go into mainstream content. Well, they’re going to have a difficult time doing that when there’s a mammoth company that is controlling that market and associating the mark with its own name.”

Which is all apropos of nothing, unfortunately. The fact is that the two products don't compete with one another, aren't offered in the same places for purchase, and anyone who tries to look into a FyreTV service is going to be so bombarded with pornographic material that they aren't going to be able to be under any kind of assumption that this is somehow an Amazon product.

The "undisputed facts" listed in the original ruling pretty much lay out all you need to know. Some highlights are below.

Wreal has lost money every year from its founding in 2007 to the present.

Wreal’s FyreTV.com homepage shows several rows of highly explicit pornographic images.

Amazon markets the Amazon Fire TV’s family-friendly features, advertising that the “FreeTime” service “revolutionizes parental controls – parents can choose what your kids see and set time limits for types of content and times of day.”

Wreal does not believe its use of the “Netflix” mark infringes any trademarks because it believes Netflix operates in a different market.

And it goes on from there. Nothing about this suit made sense in the beginning as anything other than a money-grab. To revive it now when a court recognized it for what it was would make even less sense.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, fire tv, fyre, fyretv, porn, streaming, trademark
Companies: amazon, fyretv, wreal llc

Georgia Towns Sue Netflix In Flimsy Bid To Nab A Slice Of The Pie

from the good-luck-with-that dept

A handful of municipalities in Georgia have filed a lawsuit (pdf) against Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming providers in a ham-fisted bid to saddle customers with cable franchise fees. Such franchise fees were common in the cable TV era. In large part because such cable providers had a physical presence in local municipalities. They utilized public rights of way, hung their coaxial cable on city-owned utility poles, often had local offices or broadcast hubs, and in some instances provided public access television.

As a result, traditional cable companies struck local franchise agreements requiring they pay the local community for the right to access public property and resources. Since streaming providers (usually) have no physical presence in the states they're doing business, those fees didn't transfer over to the streaming industry. Enter these Georgia towns, which filed a lawsuit not only claiming that traditional cable companies haven't been paying the money they owe, but that streaming providers like Hulu and Netflix should also be paying up:

"Gwinnett County, Brookhaven and Athens-Clarke County are seeking an injunction to keep these video service providers from operating in their municipalities until they acquire the necessary franchises, agree to pay franchise fees in the future and compensate the plaintiffs for the unpaid fees for past service dating back to July 1, 2007 as well as legal fees.

The total amount owed to these municipalities if they win the case could be much more than $5 million."

The towns are leaning heavily on a Georgia law named the Consumer Choice for Television Act. The Act was updated in 2007 to require that "video services" pay the town or city a quarterly franchise fee to municipalities in areas where they use the local internet service provider’s broadband facilities to deliver content. The problem, of course, is aside from local content delivery network hubs (CDNs), the municipalities in question aren't really doing anything that warrants getting a slice of this revenue. That's not stopping them, apparently:

"While competitors such as Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox have paid franchise fees in compliance with this law, DirecTV, DISH, Netflix, Hulu and Disney have neglected to apply for a franchise or pay franchise fees since this law went into effect on July 1, 2007, the court filing claims."

This isn't the first effort of this type. Towns in Nevada, Texas, Indiana, and Ohio have been trying something similar. Companies like Netflix, as you might expect, aren't particularly impressed:

"These cases falsely seek to treat streaming services as if they were cable and internet access providers, which they aren’t,” a Netflix spokesperson told The Verge. "They also threaten to place a tax on consumers that the legislature never intended, and we are confident that the courts will conclude that these cases are meritless."

While there's always the chance the case could be heard by idiot judges, I think Netflix is probably right. That said, most of these municipalities have every right to be annoyed, and this is more complicated than just "mean old municipalities are being greedy."

Cities have long been solidly screwed by the telecom and cable industry, which in the early aughts effectively gutted most local (town, city level) franchise agreements. Basically, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon, looking to get into the TV business, whined incessantly about how unfair it was to have to do things like expand broadband and TV service evenly, provide a few public access TV channels, and give local municipalities fair compensation for using city utility poles and public rights of way.

So, over-emphasizing the real occasions where city leaders made unreasonable demands, they lobbied to shift most franchise control to the state level, claiming this would result in greater efficiency, more competition and lower prices. The problem: because state legislatures are more efficiently corruptible by AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast lobbyists, most of these new state agreements by and large screwed cities over, gutted most consumer protections, obliterated local franchise revenue, neutered most of the benefits more local agreements provided (like even broadband deployment), and resulted in state-level agreements that were little more than telecom legislative wish lists.

In the end, cities lost authority and income while facing no shortage of new, costly challenges (like climate change, infrastructure erosion, and COVID). But while it's understandable that municipalities are pissed in the wake of getting railroaded by the telecom sector and losing revenue, trying to claw back this income from streaming providers that have little to no actual presence in these areas doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Filed Under: cable tv, franchise fees, georgia, streaming
Companies: hulu, netflix

Wonder Woman Forces AT&T & Roku To End Their Petty Squabbles

from the gatekeepers-gonna-gatekeep dept

At the start of this year, AT&T's creatively named streaming app, AT&T TV Now (since renamed HBO Max), was unceremoniously pulled from all Roku streaming hardware after a contract between the two companies expired and they couldn't agree on a new one.

It took more than a year of folks not being able to watch AT&T streaming services for this standoff to finally break, and it required leveraging the strength of Wonder Woman to do so. After being unable to come to an agreement for much of the year, AT&T used its ownership of Time Warner to gain a little leverage on Roku. First, it announced that the anticipated Wonder Woman sequel would be released on Christmas day, but only on HBO Max. Then, it announced a major plan to release most major 2021 theater releases simultaneously on both streaming and in theaters.

As the Wonder Woman 1984 release date approaches, Roku appears to have buckled. The sides this week announced a new deal that will finally bring AT&T's HBO Max to Roku:

"On Christmas Day, the superhero sequel “Wonder Woman 1984” from AT&T’s Warner Bros. will premiere on HBO Max on the same day as in theaters. That heightened the stakes for both HBO Max and Roku. The debut will be the biggest moment yet for HBO Max, a bet that a blockbuster film can boost subscribers at a time when the pandemic has shut down many theaters."

One of AT&T's major asks of Roku and companies like Amazon is that they stop selling access to HBO apps via their streaming platforms, instead shoveling folks toward AT&T's HBO Max platform. After a series of missteps and price hikes (caused by merger mania debt), AT&T lost an astonishing 7 million pay and streaming TV customers in just the last three years. It's now using its Warner Brothers catalog successfully for leverage, given Roku didn't want millions of U.S. consumers waking up on Christmas day wondering why they couldn't watch Wonder Woman with everybody else.

Whether this works out as a broader strategy for AT&T remains to be seen. AT&T's rush to release all Warner Brothers films to streaming has pissed off many mainstream directors like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, who say the company didn't really share its plan with many folks at Time Warner, didn't give much (any) consideration on how the pivot impacted union employees struggling to survive, and is basically just a stunt to spur AT&T's lagging subscription numbers:

"There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion. Therefore, even though “Dune” is about cinema and audiences, AT&T is about its own survival on Wall Street. With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention."

On one hand, releasing films straight to streaming is a good idea given the public health crisis. On the other hand, these directors are right that AT&T's probably the last company on Earth capable of making such a major pivot with nuance or any serious care of craft, given its repeated bumblings so far. Meanwhile it's ironic to watch AT&T, largely a gatekeeping bully in telecom, suddenly face gatekeeper restrictions as it's forced to actually compete. You can expect a lot more standoffs like the AT&T/Roku affair as media and platform giants begin truly flexing their muscles in a bid for platform domination.

Filed Under: streaming, tv, wonder woman
Companies: at&t, roku

Nintendo Hates You: DMCA Takedowns Of Game Music Continue While Nintendo Offers No Legit Way To Listen

from the mine-mine-mine dept

Well, it's been a measurable amount of time, so we have yet another example of Nintendo doing the Nintendo, which is best described as depriving its fans of ways to celebrate their fandom via intellectual property enforcement while also offering no alternative route for said fans. Whether it's stripping some of the creative fun out of its Animal Kingdom game, nuking fan-made games of Nintendo properties like some kind of IP-version of Missile Command, or just generally being as IP protectionist as possible, it seems that Nintendo chooses restrictive enforcement over creative methods for granting fans permission to be fans at every turn.

You will recall that Nintendo is currently embroiled in a controversy, having first disallowed a Smash Bros. tournament that had to go remote over the use of a mod that made remote tournaments possible with the game, followed by rescinding the broadcast ability of a Splatoon 2 tournament almost certainly just because several teams chose team-names that were protests of its Smash tournament actions. The backlash over those actions have been fairly universal, which may explain why Nintendo is now retreating to older, more familiar methods for pissing people off: DMCAing music from its beloved games.

Now, they’ve come under fire yet again for taking down YouTube videos with music from Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Mario Kart Wii. It’s nothing new. Nintendo has been doing it for years, and they’re well within their rights to.  

GilvaSunner is a YouTuber known for uploading soundtracks from video games, mostly Nintendo. Understandably, he’s had many videos taken down over the years due to copyright claims. In 2019, he posted a tweet that said, “Game over.” It includes a screenshot with emails from YouTube telling him that some videos had been blocked due to copyright claims. However, he didn’t specifically mention it was Nintendo.

Now, more than a year later, he followed up on his initial tweet with an update. More videos have been taken down over copyright claims. He specifically mentioned it was Nintendo JP, although it cannot be seen in the screenshots.

He's not the only one, of course. Again, I will point out that Nintendo absolutely can do this. It's within their rights. But they don't have to. There are plenty of methods by which it could offer an inexpensive license for people to portray its game music if it wanted to. Or, given that this is copyright and not trademark law we're talking about, Nintendo could simply ignore all of this, as they selectively have throughout the years. The post goes on to note that reactions to these takedowns among Nintendo fans are mixed, which is understandable.

But it seems like fans are also finally beginning to ask the right questions.

Either way, the consensus is that this whole predicament has a simple solution. Nintendo needs to make the music from their game soundtracks more readily available and in a legal way.

“Please put your soundtracks on Spotify and/or other music streaming services,” said GilvaSunner. “Others have already seen the light, when will you?” It’s a sentiment that others share.

And thus we have the crux of how Nintendo does the Nintendo. The company patrols and controls its intellectual property with a fervor normally reserved for cult followers, but refuses to offer the legitimate -- and lucrative! -- methods for fans to enjoy that intellectual property.

Nintendo, whatever else I might want to say about the company, makes great products. And great art! Being restrictive on the IP side while also being restrictive over where that art is enjoyed is immensely frustrating, both to me and the real, true fans of the company's work.

Filed Under: dmca, fan made games, mario kart wii, ocarina of time, streaming, super mario 64, takedowns, youtubers
Companies: nintendo, youtube

Tillis Release Details Of His Felony Streaming Bill; A Weird Gift To Hollywood At The Expense Of Taxpayers

from the and-why-through-omnibus dept

Earlier today, we wrote about reports detailing the latest attempt to push through a bill to make streaming copyright-covered works online a possible felony, this time being pushed by Senator Thom Tillis, who wanted to attach it to the federal spending omnibus bill. As we noted, Tillis was pushing back on some of the criticism, saying that the bill is very narrowly tailored and wouldn't be used to criminalize random people. Of course, the response to that is twofold: (1) if this is the case, why haven't you released the text and (2) why are you shoving it onto a must-pass funding bill without any of the normal debate and discussion?

This afternoon Tillis dealt with the first part of this by finally releasing the text of the bill. And he's somewhat correct in noting that the bill is narrowly tailored. That doesn't make it good or necessary. The key bit is this:

PROHIBITED ACT.—It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that

‘‘(1) is primarily designed or provided for the purpose of publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law;

‘‘(2) has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law; or

‘‘(3) is intentionally marketed by or at the direction of that person to promote its use in publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law.

So, the argument is that the "narrow" tailoring here is such that it only applies to websites, not users, if that site is "primarily" engaged in streaming unlicensed copyright-covered works, has no significant purpose other than that, and intentionally markets itself as such.

And, to Tillis' credit, this is much more narrowly tailored than previous such bills. It still doesn't explain why the text is only just being released now or (more importantly) why this has to be added to a must-pass Christmas Tree government funding bill.

To some extent, the thinking behind this bill is that it's focused on a very specific set of circumstances. There have been websites out there that stream content they host, and those already faced felony charges for the hosting -- but this seems to extend that to sites that stream the content that is hosted elsewhere. Of course, there is a much bigger question of why is this a criminal issue in the first place? It is yet another example of Hollywood trying to pass off what should be a civil issue, where the movie studios and record labels have every right and ability to sue these companies in court, and turn them into an issue that the US taxpayer now has to deal with? It's basically a giant subsidy to Hollywood, taking a private dispute and putting it on the public dime.

As Public Knowledge says in its response to the bill's release, "we do not see the need for further criminal penalties for copyright infringement." Indeed.

The end result is that this bill is not as horrific as past felony streaming bills, and is, in fact, narrowly tailored. However, that does not change the fact that moving copyright issues away from civil disputes to be handled by copyright holders, to the federal government, is something that we should not support. Indeed, it should be seen as somewhat odd that a Trump-supporting Republican, who claims to be for keeping government out of business, is directly subsidizing Hollywood by having the federal government and US taxpayers take over their own civil legal dispute by turning them into criminal issues.

And, more importantly, none of this explains why the bill should be released at the last moment, and then dumped into the must-pass federal spending bill. It's a bad idea. If Tillis really thinks this bill is good and necessary, he should have to defend it as such through the regular process bills go through.

Filed Under: copyright, criminal copyright, felony streaming, platforms, streaming, thom tillis

Stupid Cable TV Retrans Feuds And Blackouts Make Their Way To Streaming TV

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. For the end user, so-called "retransmission feuds" usually go something like this: a broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the same content. The pay TV provider balks, and one side or the other blacks out the aforementioned content. Consumers spend a few months paying for content they can't access, while the two sides bitch at each other and try to leverage consumer anger against the other guy.

After a while a new confidential deal is struck, customers face a higher bill, and never get any sort of refund for missing content. Wash, rinse, repeat. Over and over again. With regulators largely sitting on their hands as consumers get the short end of the stick.

While some might think the innovative streaming revolution is going to fix stupidity like this, evidence suggests that's not likely. While a different variety of feud, AT&T and Roku have been in a standoff preventing AT&T's HBO Max from appearing on Roku devices. And last week, Sinclair-owned CBS stations were pulled from Hulu completely because the two sides couldn't put on their big boy pants and agree to a new contract without taking it out on paying subscribers:

"Hulu is next in the line of cable providers and streaming services to lose locals due to disputes with broadcasters. Some viewers started receiving scrolling on-screen notices over the weekend, letting them know that their CBS station could be removed from Hulu."

This being Sinclair's particular brand of highly partisan, homogenized disinfotainment, many won't care that they lose access to these networks. Sinclair obviously cares, given that fuboTV, YouTube TV, and SlingTV (Dish Network) removed the company's costly regional sports channels last year from their own streaming lineups, contributing to a $4.18 billion loss for Sinclair in the third quarter. But this sort of stuff is only going to get more common and probably dumber, as broadcasters relentlessly try to extract more and more money from already frustrated consumers during an historic health and economic crisis.

For years, even Wall Street stock jocks have warned that the broadcast industry's relentless price hikes simply aren't sustainable. It's creating a sort of death loop where broadcasters demand more money, cable companies acquiesce and raise rates, and consumers, realizing they're better off skipping TV and reading a book or watching TikTok after several rate hikes each year, finally cut the cord. And while competition from streaming has certainly helped the sector in terms of more flexible choices and lower rates, many of the pay TV sectors dumbest and most self-harming tactics are starting to come along for the ride.

That means a steady parade of rate hikes that erode the value proposition of your monthly streaming subscription, and the routine blackouts and disputes that result in you paying more money for content you can't access. It would be relatively simple for a regulator to bar consumer-harming blackouts during negotiations (or at least ensure consumers are compensated for losing access to content they pay for), but this being a country where consumer protection policy is usually set by industry (which is why there often isn't any), that doesn't seem likely anytime soon.

Filed Under: content blackouts, hbo max, retransmission, streaming
Companies: at&t, cbs, hulu, roku, sinclair broadcasting