On Thursday, June 26, the USA men’s football team moved on to the knock-out round of 16 in the World Cup, but the day before, startup Aereo lost its battle for survival in the Supreme Court.
What does USA FIFA football team advancing have to do with Aereo losing? ESPN and sports on television.
The Supreme Court case was titled American Broadcasting, Co. (ABC) vs. Aereo. ABC and ESPN are owned by the Walt Disney Co., which was joined in the case by CBS, NBC Universal (owned by cable TV giant Comcast), FOX and all the large cable TV companies and cable networks. The broadcast networks and their owned TV stations all claimed that it wasn’t fair for Aereo to retransmit their programming without paying them.
The details of copyright law are too complicated for me to fathom, so I can’t comment on that aspect of the case. Many bloggers and other news sources commented intelligently by focusing on the legal issues in the case, as Jerry Markon, Robert Barnes and Cecilia Kang did in the Washington Post. Some, like Farhad Manjoo in the NY Times Bits blog, commented on the technology issues involved, especially the implications that the Court’s decision might have on cloud storage companies.
But I think it’s interesting to see how the Supreme Court members divided in the 6-3 split. The Court’s three most conservative members (Alito, Scalia and Thomas) were on the dissenting team. Did they not understand the technology involved or interpret the copyright laws differently than the majority (Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Kennedy, Roberts and Sotomayor)?
Could it be the conservatives were voting in favor of a free-market solution and the majority was voting for a more liberal-oriented regulatory solution? Or could it be that the conservatives were sick and tired of their cable TV bills ballooning and wanted to cut the cord, or maybe they just weren’t interested in World Cup football? Free, over-the-air NFL, yes; cable-and-ESPN-delivered FIFA, no.
Or could it be that the conservative trio were looking ahead to 2018, when Fox and Telemundo will be carrying the World Cup, for which they paid $1.2 billion for the two-year package, outbidding ESPN and Univision, which paid $425 for the current FIFA package. Maybe they thought it was a fair, free-market solution for Aereo or other retransmission delivery systems not to pay anything to sports rights holders such as ESPN and FOX.
If you were a Supreme Court justice and liked the World Cup, loved ESPN and other cable network programming (MTV, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, CNBC, Bloomberg News, etc.) and couldn’t bear the thought of cutting the cord, you would vote in favor of the broadcasters and cable networks and believe it was not fair for Aereo to pay nothing to broadcast networks for programming, especially not to pay for expensive sports programming.
The majority might have seen the chaos that would have ensued if they voted for Aereo. FOX and Telemundo would more than likely demand that FIFA re-negotiate the $1.2 billion deal. FOX, CBS, NBC and ESPN would more than likely demand that the NFL re-negotiate the multi-billion rights deals. FOX and ESPN would want to re-do their deals with Major League Baseball. All too much to contemplate — too much money involved.
Thus, the decision against Aereo was the easiest way out – give the money to the broadcast and cable networks, the TV stations and the sports leagues, not to upstart Aereo and its backer, Barry Diller. The decision also put off the eventual demise of broadcast and cable TV a little longer, just like the USA World Cup football team’s advancement put off its eventual defeat a little longer.
