An appeals court’s denial of a Fox injunction...

Supreme Court’s 1984 Sony Betamax decision, “it is long-settled law that recording a television program for personal viewing is legal fair use,” Shapiro said. “Over and over, the broadcasters have gone to court claiming that new innovations will be harmful to their industry. In fact, these new products have opened up vast new revenue streams and consumer markets.” He urged broadcasters to “embrace -- not attempt to crush -- new technologies that make television more convenient to watch.” Broadcasters need to stop suing “innovators like Dish and Aereo, and start providing the cutting-edge functions and features that their viewers demand,” Shapiro said.The ruling is favorable to Dish in the short term, said a Moody’s analyst said. But the disruptive nature of the ad-skipping feature “may ultimately hurt Dish in the long-run when it faces affiliate agreement renewals with broadcasters,” said analyst Neil Begley in a research note. If AutoHop becomes widespread among other pay-TV distributors, “networks will not be sufficiently compensated for their content, the cost of which is currently subsidized by advertising revenue,” he said. The DBS company may end up facing contentious retransmission and distribution negotiations and pay higher fees, “which may bear a greater cost than the benefit provided by the AutoHop feature,” he said. The networks will likely seek to make up for lost revenue “by asking for higher fees than typical in the next round of distribution negotiations, at a time when pay-TV distributors are struggling to contain programming costs which they can no longer pass off to their customers,” he said.