In New York City, you can now watch the Olympics for free. (Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)
A newly-launched nonprofit is seeking to solve a dilemma faced by the many sports fans weighing whether to cut the cable cord: it’s offering to stream local broadcast stations in high definition to users’ smartphones for free. That includes the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
Locast.org, founded by longtime communications attorney and Sports Fans Coalition chairman David Goodfriend, offers a free streaming app for local broadcast stations that’s currently only available to users in New York.
But Goodfriend says the company is using NYC, with its tall buildings and condensed living spaces that can disrupt over-the-air signals, as a test market, and plans to expand to other cities as soon as funding allows.
The service, which launched on Jan. 11, streams broadcast channels, such as NBC, CBS and FOX, without having to ask for broadcaster permission. In that sense, Locast borrows from the same tactics used by Aereo a few years ago, which captured over-the-air TV signals that it streamed to customers for $8 month before it was shut down in a U.S. Supreme Court dispute in 2014.
However, Goodfriend, who says Locast has received “tens of thousands” of new users over the past month and has yet to receive a word of complaint from the broadcasters (though he suspects it’s coming), is attempting to skirt the law that bankrupted Aereo by operating under a 1976 copyright statute that allows nonprofit organizations to retransmit local stations for public good.
The law was originally intended to provide basic access to television stations to people in areas with poor reception so they could access local news, weather and other public-interest programming. Goodfriend, a former Clinton Administration official, believes that sports should be considered among the basic programming that represent the public’s interest because of the amount of taxpayer money that has gone into construction and renovation projects for city stadiums and arenas.
Of the 31 NFL stadiums, 29 have received public subsidies to cover construction costs since 1995, according to a 2015 report from the nonprofit Tax Payers Protection Alliance.
“You have all these public resources that go into sports,” Goodfriend said. “The government should not be preventing or in any way facilitating the prevention of fans’ access to games they helped pay for.”
In 2009, Goodfriend founded Sports Fans Coalition as a grassroots consumer advocacy group that represents the fan’s point of view in policy issues. In 2014, the group successfully petitioned the FCC to end the 40-year-old Sports Blackout Rule despite what he claimed was “heavy lobbying” from the NFL, MLB, NHL, NBA and broadcast industry.
Now, SFC is using Locast.org as a way to capture over-the-air broadcasts and serve them to the public. In the New York market, it retransmits 15 broadcast channels, including sports-heavy stations CBS, NBC, FOX and ABC. Users can access the channels from the Locast app and then use a smart TV, or a device such as Chromecast that streams video to televisions from smartphones, to watch it on the big screen. The app and service are free, though Locast may eventually have to ask for donations to recover costs
Goodfriend says Locast’s user growth has been steady over the past few months, despite a number of big sporting events over the past few weeks — the NFL playoffs, Super Bowl and Olympics — that he thought would contribute to irregular spikes is usage.
He’s happy with the outcome, though, because he believes it shows that people are using Locast as a more permanent solution, and not just a temporary fix for cord-cutters to watch major sporting events.
“For the most part growth has been slow and steady at an upward rate,” he said. “What does that say to me? That word-of-mouth (awareness) is spreading.”
