Roku Tries Its Hand at Extortion, Fails Miserably

[dalekphalm]

6 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

OTA is not possible in a lot of places, and it’s not hi Rez.

It’s available in most bigger cities in North America in HD OTA - some channels are even in 1080p. And the compression is much less than cable/satellite channels so a 720p OTA might look as good as 1080p Cable. 
 

Granted, it’s not 4K (yet), but it’s definitely High Res. 

5 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

People actually bought a Roku box?

Yeah. They’re probably one of the most popular streaming boxes. I’ve had one for about 4 years. 

3 hours ago, Donut417 said:

Ummm. I get 1080p and 720p on some channels. The big guys like ABC, Fox, etc does HD. And it’s not compressed to all shit like with cable. 

This^
 

Edit: some people keep saying that the Super bowl might slam Rokus servers. 
 

Think about that for a second guys. It makes no sense. All Roku provides is the App download. The stream is ENTIRELY coming from Fox content servers. Roku has nothing to do with the stream itself. 

[Donut417]

4 hours ago, RonnieOP said:

So can bars just pay the standard home user price for roku apps and show it at the bar?

To be honest I dont think thats legal. Because businesses are a comercial enterpsie, meaning they make money. AND by showing the Super Bowl they could make even more money. Basically that would be the same as charging people just to watch the super bowl. Now that being said, will they get caught? Probably not. I mean its the same as if my City wanted to show The Avengers during movie night. Which my city does a few times a year. They LEGALLY have to pay for the rights to show the movie. Same thing applies to businesses. 

5 hours ago, RorzNZ said:

People actually bought a Roku box?

My family owns 2 of their sticks and 2 Fire Sticks. Roku has the "Roku" channel that shows a lot of free content. So yeah people buy Roku's and Fire sticks and Apple TV's. Because Cable TV sucks ballz. 

 

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The impression I got was that bars were buying them as a way to draw crowds to show the Super Bowl

Not sure its legal. Because its a commerical enterprise. Generally businesses have to pay either a higher price or for the individual rights. Because technically they are using the super bowl to bring in more business and that basically means they are making money off the super bowl. Those who own the rights would be not to happy about that. Though thats if they get caught. 

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

To be honest I dont think thats legal. Because businesses are a comercial enterpsie, meaning they make money. AND by showing the Super Bowl they could make even more money. Basically that would be the same as charging people just to watch the super bowl. Now that being said, will they get caught? Probably not. I mean its the same as if my City wanted to show The Avengers during movie night. Which my city does a few times a year. They LEGALLY have to pay for the rights to show the movie. Same thing applies to businesses. 

My family owns 2 of their sticks and 2 Fire Sticks. Roku has the "Roku" channel that shows a lot of free content. So yeah people buy Roku's and Fire sticks and Apple TV's. Because Cable TV sucks ballz. 

 

Not sure its legal. Because its a commerical enterprise. Generally businesses have to pay either a higher price or for the individual rights. Because technically they are using the super bowl to bring in more business and that basically means they are making money off the super bowl. Those who own the rights would be not to happy about that. Though thats if they get caught. 

It would certainly be very situational.  If they had the rights to run the program though they might, depending on how law was written, be able to use it to display higher Rez content.   The kicker here is the 4k.  If they would be able to display OTA they might be able to do it in 4k as well if the thing was being shown OTA.  It strikes me as legally complicated.  FOX seems to want to limit what resolution the event can be seen in and its possible depending on how thing are written that they might not have a right to actually be able to do that.

[pas008]

15 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

To be honest I dont think thats legal. Because businesses are a comercial enterpsie, meaning they make money. AND by showing the Super Bowl they could make even more money. Basically that would be the same as charging people just to watch the super bowl. Now that being said, will they get caught? Probably not. I mean its the same as if my City wanted to show The Avengers during movie night. Which my city does a few times a year. They LEGALLY have to pay for the rights to show the movie. Same thing applies to businesses. 

My family owns 2 of their sticks and 2 Fire Sticks. Roku has the "Roku" channel that shows a lot of free content. So yeah people buy Roku's and Fire sticks and Apple TV's. Because Cable TV sucks ballz. 

 

Not sure its legal. Because its a commerical enterprise. Generally businesses have to pay either a higher price or for the individual rights. Because technically they are using the super bowl to bring in more business and that basically means they are making money off the super bowl. Those who own the rights would be not to happy about that. Though thats if they get caught. 

i think over the air, cable, and satellite have more openness to this because its not a pay per view

[Donut417]

11 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

f they would be able to display OTA they might be able to do it in 4k as well if the thing was being shown OTA.

ATSC 3.0 will allow that. They are currently testings the tech in a few markets. On top of the fact its been shown that it will provide better siganl to most. The only issue is this standard allows paid content on OTA. So its hard to say how the broadcasters will act on that. OH and you will need a new tuner. Maybe in a few more years it will catch on. 

 

6 minutes ago, pas008 said:

i think over the air, cable, and satellite have more openness to this because its not a pay per view

It is Pay per view when the contnet your showing is bringing in customers. Also Comcast has specifically plans for PUBLIC VIEWING TV. I gaurentee it costs more than what a company would have to pay for employees to watch or what you pay for home service. https://business.comcast.com/learn/tv/public 

 

https://business.comcast.com/learn/tv If you look here I specifies what "Private Viewing" and "Public Viewing" plans are for. 

[pas008]

15 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

ATSC 3.0 will allow that. They are currently testings the tech in a few markets. On top of the fact its been shown that it will provide better siganl to most. The only issue is this standard allows paid content on OTA. So its hard to say how the broadcasters will act on that. OH and you will need a new tuner. Maybe in a few more years it will catch on. 

 

It is Pay per view when the contnet your showing is bringing in customers. Also Comcast has specifically plans for PUBLIC VIEWING TV. I gaurentee it costs more than what a company would have to pay for employees to watch or what you pay for home service. https://business.comcast.com/learn/tv/public 

 

https://business.comcast.com/learn/tv If you look here I specifies what "Private Viewing" and "Public Viewing" plans are for. 

yeah i'm not sure my area has that

https://business.spectrum.com/tv-bars-restaurants.html

 

and i think satellite is the same

[Donut417]

2 minutes ago, pas008 said:

yeah i'm not sure my area has that

https://business.spectrum.com/tv-bars-restaurants.html

 

and i think satellite is the same

Point is, they have speical plans for businsses. You pay more generally for less service. 

[pas008]

1 minute ago, Donut417 said:

Point is, they have speical plans for businsses. You pay more generally for less service. 

actually those bundles are priced like residental here

but generally yes they are

[Bombastinator]

Well the game should be over or winding up by now, so aside from the lawsuit likely to be filed by some one it’s more or less over.

[suicidalfranco]

Spoiler

KC 

 

[Touch My Hamm]

Roku should be careful as its not hard for other companies to come make smart tv devices that could easily beat it out.... Roku locking out many apps for streaming from phone to TV is the reason I just built my own android box and have it connected to my home server. Roku could get more customers and more money if they open up their software to more android based apps and usage. Roku has a somewhat non tech friends appearance and this is the main reason some people use it. Maybe it will learn from this to not try to extort and instead be innovative to make its money LOL. 

[kpluck]

Well they reached a deal late Friday so the apps were back for the SB.

 

-kp

[Kisai]

On 1/30/2020 at 10:22 PM, Vitamanic said:

 

So Roku decided to send out email all of their users to let them know that they were pulling 7 different FOX apps from customer devices the next day (they gave about 8 hours notice). This was the first that anyone heard of such a thing, it came out of nowhere, days before the Super Bowl. Many people rely on the FOX app for sports since it's usable without a cable subscription. Roku continued on to make a statement saying that this was due to a "carriage dispute" between the companies. However, FOX quickly, and angrily released their own statement:

 

Well, turns out that FOX called their bluff and didn't cave to their demands. Thus, we have the last second "Hey guys, sorry! We're going to delete all of our FOX apps in a few hours, good luck!" email.

 

 

This is not really the right interpretation. Roku and Fox knew the contract was ending. Period. The Superbowl is not going to work as leverage because Roku doesn't have that leverage. Rather people who want that content and can't get it will just watch a stream somewhere else, like their friends house or in a bar.

 

At best, this is just going to make people think twice about Roku. At worst it's going to make Fox (sports) realize they have more leverage than they think they do.

 

The reality is that not everyone gives a care about sports, and Roku should have the statistics from it's own streams to know how that would impact things. 

 

This is also why content owners should not be content broadcasters and vice versa. It creates a very artificial price, where they charge their own affiliates and partners less or nothing, and cuts anyone out of the market unwilling to pay a price that they only charge non-partners.

 

And if we're really being honest here, media consolidation is bad, but a dozen different smartTV app stores, let alone streaming subscriptions is ludicrous. Remember what Java promised and ultimately oracle destroyed? The possibility of having one app written once and run everywhere? Well, this is the result of having to write separate apps for separate TV's.

 

The next phase will be what AppleTV is doing and instead of having separate apps for every channel, there will just be services attached to one app, and the service provider will pay the app provider to maintain the app on that device and this becomes a non-issue on the most popular devices.

 

As it is, on my iPad, I have or had apps for a several different TV channels, but their apps were just utterly bad, or the streams that were available didn't work if I wasn't on the WiFi of the service provider, it was just a bad experience all around and I quit using them.