CEA condemned NAB President Gordon Smith’s “repeated and...
CEA condemned NAB President Gordon Smith’s “repeated and spurious attacks” on Aereo and Dish during Tuesday’s Senate Communications Subcommittee hearing on the state of the video market. “We encourage broadcasters to move aggressively to meet consumer needs and embrace new…
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TV technologies, rather than litigate or threaten to pull programming off-the-air,” said Michael Petricone, CEA senior vice president-government and regulatory affairs, in a news release. Smith told lawmakers at the hearing that Dish’s AutoHop technology “gets rid of broadcast ads” and said networks need to be “paid for the value of what we provide” (CD May 15 p8). CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC have sued Dish in federal court seeking injunctions that would bar the AutoHop feature based on their claims that it amounts to contributory copyright infringement (CD Dec 5 p19). Smith also told lawmakers Tuesday that online-TV startup Aereo, which streams broadcast-TV signals to consumers via the Web, is committing “piracy.” Petricone said CEA “share[s] the concerns” of Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who noted the recent comments from executives at several networks who threatened to take their programming off the air to thwart Aereo’s business model. Warner told Smith that if broadcasters have public spectrum “and are threatening to withdraw content because of these other challenges, it really raises for me the question of whether you ought to be able to keep that spectrum for free.”