Aereo, the company that give customers access to over-the-air channels online with a cloud based DVR, has announced plans to expand its service to Atlanta beginning June 17.

“We’re grateful and humbled by the continued support we’ve received from consumers for our technology,” said Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia. “The response and enthusiasm from consumers across all of our expansion cities has been phenomenal. It’s clear that consumers want more choice and flexibility in how they watch television and they don’t want to be fenced into expensive, outdated technology.”

Aereo launches tomorrow in Boston.  The service has faced stiff legal challenges from broadcasters and content creators alike for its ability to grab content from over the air antennas and sell it to its customers without paying licensing fees.

Yesterday, the company announced a simplified pricing structure with an $8.00 a month fee for basic service and an upgraded plan with expanded DVR storage for $12.00 a month.

Andrew Heyward, former head of CBS News from 1996 until 2005, recently wrote a piece in AdvertisingAge that starts out like most “Local News Is In Trouble” stories. But get past the stats about local news going the way of the wireless radio or newspapers or the McDLT and you’ll find a refreshing look at what may be keeping young viewers away from local news.

Heyward says the biggest allure of TV news for older viewers may be the biggest roadblock for younger ones, a one size fits all format where the station decides what the viewers see.

The next generation doesn’t need ours to organize the world into a tidy package. Ironically, the value of a local newscast to its loyalists — that it wraps the day in a friendly, familiar, reassuring experience that viewers can sit back and enjoy — is the very thing that makes the genre seem archaic if not irrelevant to the BuzzFeed and Reddit crowd. “One size fits all” holds little appeal to a generation that has grown up with “one size fits me.” Read more

In the run up to Super Bowl Sunday, TVB has released a study that shows when viewers were given a choice between watching their hometown NFL team on their local broadcast TV station or on a cable network, they overwhelmingly chose local TV.

The study compared ratings for games airing on cable networks ESPN and the NFL network with the simulcast on the team’s local broadcast stations. When ESPN or the NFL network air a national presentation of a game, they are required to provide a live feed to each team’s local broadcast TV partner.

In the 30 markets where a local station simulcast a game airing on a cable network, the local station drew 75 percent more households than the cable outlet. Read more

Aereo, the embattled internet service allowing consumers to watch TV over the internet without paying licensing fees, has announced it will be expanding its service to 22 cities.

“Consumers want and deserve choice,” said Aereo chief executive officer and founder Chet Kanojia. “Watching television should be simple, convenient and rationally priced. Aereo’s technology provides exactly that: choice, flexibility and a first-class experience that every consumer deserves.”

What makes Aereo both unique and a possible threat to local TV stations is the technology enables consumers to watch and record live broadcast television on computers, tablets or even smartphones without paying for the broadcast content.  Subscriber fees for the service start at $8 a day or $80 a year.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Aereo was able to avoid being shutdown because of its technology,

A federal judge in New York ruled in July that the service doesn’t appear to violate copyright law because individual subscribers are assigned their own, tiny antenna at Aereo’s Brooklyn data center, making it analogous to the free signal a consumer would get with a regular antenna at home. Aereo spent the subsequent months selecting markets for expansion and renting space for new equipment in those cities. Read more

Newscast Studio has taken a look back at the trends seen in news set design last year. Here are the takeaways:

Curves are out. Straight lines are in. Stations are trending towards a sleeker, more European feel as straight lines are taking over for the sweeping curves that were once the industry standard.

Technology is driving set design. More stations are relying on back lit color-changing LED walls and flat panel screens to add visual interest instead of printed graphics depicting local scenes or station branding.

Texture reflects the market. According to Newscast studio, “designers are working hard to incorporate the ‘feel’ of the city while making the set unique.” Count copper, brushed aluminum and brick among the touches designers add to accomplish this. Read more

WGNO reporter Kenny Lopez says his favorite part of the holidays is “12 Days of Giving,” a series of reports that follow him as he performs random acts of kindness around the New Orleans community.

“My producers joke with me that this can be my schtick,” Lopez told TVSpy. “They say this is my thing now. I would love to do it every single Christmas.”

WGNO’s “12 Days of Giving” is one of many examples of local stations increasing charitable efforts around the holidays. There are toy drives and coat drives, telethons, visits to local hospitals. And there are more unique initiatives: KELO, the CBS affiliate in Sioux Falls, teamed up with a local radio station to sponsor “Drive Thru Difference Day,” encouraging people stopping at local drive-thrus to buy coffee or a meal for the person in line behind them.

WJAR kicked off its “Season of Giving” campaign to benefit the Make-a-Wish foundation with a telethon earlier this month. The Providence NBC affiliate raised $12,000 — which included a $5,000 donation from the station (pictured)  — and more than one million unused airline miles for children with life-threatening medical conditions.

“It felt like it was a perfect fit for the Christmas holiday season,” WJAR news director Chris Lanni told TVSpy. “It worked really well for us as a station to give back during this time to a cause that specifically helps children.” Read more

A new study by the Radio Television Digital News Association and Hoftsra University found salaries at local television stations have been losing ground to inflation for the last ten years.

The study tracked salaries at local TV stations over a five and ten year period.  In the period between 2007 and 2012, while inflation rose by 12 percent, local TV pay rose by only 10.5 percent.  The pay gap widened over a ten year period with inflation rising by 28 percent while salaries rose by just 21.6 percent.

Between 2002 and 2012, the study showed only news directors (+35.9%), weathercasters ( (+37%), sports anchors (+28.6%), and assignment editors (+28.3%) beat the rise of inflation.  The biggest loser over the ten year period were web and mobile writers (+13.3%).  News assistants saw the largest drop (-3.1%) in pay between 2007 and 2012 compared to an inflation rate of 12 percent.

Click here to view the .pdf of the report.

[Variety]

White males may be losing traction when it comes to politics, but not so when when it comes to owning TV stations.

A recent Federal Communications Commission study shows that as of 2011, 69 percent of commercial broadcast stations are owned by whites.

The remaining 31 percent was split between station ownership identified by ethnicity (2 percent) and those that weren’t (28 percent).

Station ownership by women was also lacking.  Women owned only 6.8 percent of all commercial stations in 2011 while men owned 64.8 percent, .5 percent were jointly owned and 28 percent were owned by no majority male or female interest.

According to the study minorities owned just 30 of the 1,348 full power commercial stations in the US.

The full study can be read by clicking here.

[Los Angeles Times]

MediaDailyNews is reporting when it comes to blackouts over carriage fee disputes, it may have to get worse before it gets better.

According to the article, the practice of satellite or cable carriers cutting off viewer access to networks or local stations during disputes or vice-versa has steadily increased since 2010.  This year there were 70 blackouts compared to 51 in 2011 and just 12 in 2010.  But the article said viewers will see more blackouts before the government steps in.

In a email from TargetCast representatives, the agency says: “We believe that there will have to be significantly more, and longer, blackout periods for Congress and the FCC to take action.  For the most part, the system is working, as the majority of the 15,000 [plus] deals are done successfully and quietly behind the scenes, with only 1% becoming public disputes impacting viewers.” Read more

TVSpy’s sister site, LostRemote has posted the results of a recent study about tablet use and television.  Exploring what they’re calling two-screen viewing, consumer research house GfK MRI concluded that 63% of tablet owners watch TV while using their tablets at least once a week.  The breakdown of two-screen viewers by gender and age is shown in the graphic above.

The number of respondents who paid attention to both TV and tablet (36%) and those who paid more attention to their tablet (36%) was evenly split.  The takeaway?  Tablets can distract users from paying attention to what’s happening on TV.  But that isn’t necessarily bad news for advertisers.  The study shows 28% of two-screen viewers looked up a product that was advertised on a show they were watching.

The study also shows two-screen viewing isn’t going away with 81% of those surveyed saying they liked having two screens in front of them regardless of where their attention falls.

Click here for the .pdf of the study.  You can also see graphic breakdowns of what people do while two-screen viewing and the possible growth opportunity for advertisers and TV stations after the jump. Read more