ivi TV

» see ivi.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I could have watched American local television from Ankara for five dollars a month for about five months in late 2010, and I did not know the option existed until long afterward. That was the strange edge of ivi: it was a service built around United States broadcast signals that had no geographic fence on the other end, so its most provocative feature from a lawyer's point of view was that anyone anywhere could subscribe.

ivi Inc. launched on 13 September 2010 out of Seattle, founded by Todd Weaver. It captured the over-the-air signals of FCC-licensed stations, encrypted them, and piped them into a desktop app for $4.99 a month, with another 99 cents if you wanted a recorder. It started with New York and Seattle stations and added Chicago and Los Angeles. It asked no station for permission and paid none of them directly.

The legal theory behind that was not made up on the spot. Section 111 of the Copyright Act grants cable systems a compulsory license: retransmit broadcast signals, file the paperwork, pay the statutory royalty, and the copyright owners do not get a veto. ivi filed royalties with the Copyright Office and argued it was a cable system that happened to use the internet as its wire. The entire company was a bet on that sentence.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the argument ~

Within a week of launching, ivi sued first, filing for declaratory judgment in Washington on 20 September 2010. Eight days later the broadcasters answered in the Southern District of New York, and the plaintiff list ran through Disney, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Telemundo and a professional sports league. Judge Naomi Buchwald granted a preliminary injunction in February 2011.

The reasoning was that Congress wrote section 111 for localized systems with physical facilities, not for a service that could deliver a New York station to a subscriber in another hemisphere. The Second Circuit affirmed on 27 August 2012, and the Supreme Court declined to take the case in March 2013. Every court that looked at it reached the same place.

~ the day the signal stopped ~

ivi stopped streaming when the injunction landed and suspended billing immediately. It had been selling television for five months. Weaver said at the time that the company would look for a legislative fix, and the fix never came, because there was no constituency in Congress for a startup that had annoyed every broadcaster at once.

~ the inheritance ~

Aereo showed up the following year with a different design, thousands of tiny individual antennas meant to make each stream a private performance, and lost at the Supreme Court in 2014 anyway. The chain of reasoning that killed Aereo runs straight back through this case. Todd Weaver went on to found Purism, which sells laptops and phones built around software freedom, and gave an interview years later under the line that it is better to be right than rich.

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