you mean material freely distributed via over the air broadcast? Tuners card being a niche market? It’s about file format I thought. Weather it’s HLS on the tablo storage or a mp4 on your storage media of choice.
Yes they are a niche market compared to all other methods of watching OTA broadcasts.
Yes, almost dead… it’s irrelevant how you get the file isn’t it? There are and have been various ways to to “capture” material freely distributed via over the air broadcast. Allowing users to export it from the tablo’s storage to another media… programing that was freely distributed, for my own private personal use - do you want to buy a copy of a show you can get freely OTA?
Agree or not, the point of both the Sony and Aerion cases was that a company can’t compete with a cable or satellite provider without playing by the same set of rules they do, and the manufacturer of VCR devices can’t be held accountable for the possibility of copyright violation by the end user, anymore than Ford can be held accountable for a hit and run accident involving one of their vehicles.
Tablo is a DVR, a VCR from another generation. If people record libraries of “tapes” for their personal use, this is allowed under Sony. If they then turn around and rent them to someone, that’s not. Sharing them digitally without compensation is probably OK for individuals, but not for businesses like YouTube, who are held to a higher standard.
If someone wanted to put a pile of Tablos in every major market, and sell access to them or their output, under Aerion they would need the same retransmission consent that cable companies negotiate with broadcasters.
A Tablo can be used to time and place shift the delivery of OTA material, which messes with the Syndication Exclusivity agreements that broadcasters use to divide users into Market Areas for advertising revenue recognition purposes, which includes “black outs” of local sporting events.
If you let a friend access your Tablo to watch TV from a distant to them market, you both are violating the SynDex rules, but since OTA is provided to you as an end user contract free, these contractural restrictions can’t be enforced upon you or your friend. If you enter into a contract to sell that access to your friend, all bets are off.
Aereo was a cloud based DVR. They couldn’t fault them on that, instead they had to redefine a word in order for “law” to side with them.