I built and ran a broadcast monitoring business for 5 years from 2003 to 2007, competing with services such as TVEyes and Critical Mention. It was called RooseveltMedia.com. At peak, it recorded and catalogued about 400+ shows per day in 15 media markets and had about 75 customers.<p>As we grew, I knew we needed to expand nationwide (which would require raising VC). My saying was "We need Johnson and Johnson, not Congressman Johnson's office." but this question of legality loomed very large. Legal or illegal? If illegal, no investor in his right mind would give us money. Unfortunately, the evidence I had at the time pointed towards "illegal" rather than "legal":<p>1. There were lots of lawsuits. This Fox vs. TVEyes is not the first. We definitely tiptoed around TV groups so as not to draw attention.<p>2. The International Association of Broadcast Monitors (IABM, a group of regional services and some single-market self-employed folks) spent several hundred thousand dollars to try to get the law rewritten so that royalties would be set in stone, much like jukeboxes. Why would they do this if they didn't all also believe it was illegal? In any case, the effort failed.<p>With this evidence in hand, I tried to grow the company organically, but it became untenable. We weren't getting enough money from the single-market (or few-market) customers to fund the expansion. By contrast, Critical Mention was self-funded by a dot-commer, and completely ate our lunch. Even if we'd attempted to raise money, the fundraising sidetrack would have set us back by a few more miles and I had zero additional bandwidth. There really wasn't a good answer to the question.<p>Ultimately, despite finding product-market fit almost immediately with this freshman business effort, I decided to pivot into a more "legitimate" business. I altered the tech to provide archiving systems for TV stations... and it went over like a lead balloon, cratering the businesses and leaving me with a pile of personal debt which took a couple of years of "real world" work to pay off.<p>Since then I've tried to start 2 more companies (huzon.tv and words4chrome.com) and while my execution and engineering skills have become vastly better, neither found product-market fit like the first. Beginner's luck, I guess.
I once built a system that pulled multiple TV channels, encoded them on the fly and rebroadcast via multicast over the office LAN to reporter's desks. This was for a newsroom and would have otherwise required dozens of DVB cable drops (and subscriptions). The DirecTV guy was mighty suspicious that I had a pile of Linux boxes set up next to the receivers, and no TVs in sight.
>The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House, 100 members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press.<p>Yeah I don't think they were ever in any real danger. This isn't something average joe consumers like us use, this is something big corps, media companies, and politicians use.
On the one hand ... TVEyes sounds like a great, useful service.<p>On the other hand, once all of the legal challenges are out of the way, I can't imagine there won't be a bunch of other companies swooping in to undercut them. $500/month for a service like this? I'm thinking that has the potential to go down significantly and quickly, with competition.<p>For instance, I can imagine a cut-rate service that doesn't do speech-to-text but instead relies solely on closed captioning. Or a plan that monitors only a limited subset of channels. It might not have all the features of TVEyes, but may have enough to hurt TVEyes' business if it doesn't lower prices and offer a limited tier itself.<p>It might not make sense for such a service to pop up now, while the legal issues are unsettled, but if TVEyes bears the litigation burden to get those issues settled, I can't imagine it wouldn't face stiffer competition down the line.
<i>>>It's a significant digital-age fair use ruling, one that's especially important for people and organizations who want to comment on or criticize news coverage.</i><p>This is why FOX News sued.<p><i>>>The company has more than 2,200 subscribers, including the White House, 100 members of Congress, the Department of Defense, as well as big news organizations like Bloomberg, Reuters, ABC, and the Associated Press.</i><p>This is why FOX News lost.
Can't they work around this with licensing?<p>Basically Fox add a clause to their sales contract that says 'use of this type of thing is not allowed with our service'. That gets pushed down the line to those buying the service. TVEyes are buying a domestic service, contractually they can't get that service without committing a tort (breach of contract). <i>Et voila</i>?<p>Fox surely aren't obliged to provide the service to anyone they do not wish to supply it to. The inclusion of the Fox media on the service is proof, on the balance of probabilities, that the contract was broken ...<p>The judge is ruling that this sort of copyright infringement is not disallowed by law; but that doesn't surely mean it can't be made impossible by contract. There is no right to rip down TV broadcasts, surely?<p>It does seem now that a public facing service offering clips of up to 10 minutes of TV is allowed under this ruling. Presumably that's a new thing in USA? Also how is this different to offering digests of news websites - so I can sell NYT stories now as long as I sell lots of other peoples stories too, and so long as it's recent news, and so long as I don't let them see the whole NYT website. Clipping services bought the rights to the content.<p>I think it's a great ruling but I don't think the breadth of it will stand as I don't consider it to match with the general impetus of copyright law. Creating a video index using CC and/or speech-to-text (or human transcribers) doesn't seem particularly transformative to me, especially as the service Fox are using already is doing similar indexing. The only transformation is in the utility of the colocation of many channels - since when (other than for Google!) was "but if we sell everyone's content then it's easier" been a defence against copyright infringement.
2200 subscribers = $1.1M monthly revenue. Not bad considering the costs don't grow that much with additional subscribers. Some for serving the content on request, but I imagine the ingestion and storage is the big ticket item.<p>I wonder how long they archive for?
Seems like an interesting technical problem. Does anyone know a good way to record many TV or radio stations at once, either for storage or realtime processing?