Vanishing Content

It's been something of a holocaust on Roku this week, with no less than three multi-channel apps vanishing from the platform in a matter of days.  Unfortunately, they were amongst my most watched apps, so my viewing experience has been left very much the poorer.  The first to go was Airy TV.  Now, I'm not sure whether this gone from Roku entirely, or just the UK market.  Moreover, it was always marked as a 'Beta' version, so its disappearance might only be temporary.  Besides, I can still access the Android version on my tablet, plus.I've found that some of its more watchable channels are available via another Roku app.  It has to be said that the Roku version, while lacking the more intrusive ads of the Android version, (these are on top of the ads within the programming), did buffer a lot, often making viewing impossible.  The content it carried was mainly old TV shows and movies, (many, I suspect, without permission), but every so often it turned up something worthwhile.  The bigger blow to me has been the loss of the two F2V TV apps, which carried a huge variety of apparently legal, free-to-air streams, ranging from US nostalgia channels to specialist movie channels like Shout Cult, Kino Cult and Scream.  Now, I say 'apparently' because I'd always wondered if the app's creator had gotten specific permission from the stream owners to deliver them via his app, or whether he was simply relying on the fact that they were non-encrypted, non-subscription and ad supported.  Inevitably, it turned out to be the latter.

The problem came from a group of US channels whose streams the app started carrying, claiming that it had an exclusive deal to do so, which turned out not to be the case, with the owners objecting, resulting in their withdrawal.  Which would have been OK - a lot of their programming was available elsewhere - but then a 'journalist', (actually a blogger with pretensions and contacts), got wind of this development and saw an opportunity for a story.  After being bombarded with questions from said blogger, the app owner finally admitted that he didn't have specific permission to re-broadcast the streams, but simply relied on the fact that they were free-to-air anyway.  His apps were consequently shut down.  Leaving the blogger smug and those of us who had been happily using the apps missing a chunk of our daily viewing enjoyment.  I must admit that this whole business raises some tricky issues - I certainly wouldn't endorse copyright infringement as such, but the fact that the streams were free-to-air means that their originators at least weren't losing any revenue.  Probably the bigger issue is that of international rights - several of these streams weren't usually available in the UK as the material they carried was licensed to someone else for UK distribution.  Which means that, arguably, someone was losing potential revenues.  

Not that that stopped me from watching these streams - I managed to catch up with quite a few otherwise hard to see movies on the Cult channels, for instance.  Despite my lingering reservations about the rights issues, I comforted myself with the thought that plenty of people around the world are using VPNs to watch streams and services not licensed for their geographical locations.  Which is what I keep thinking is what I should do and access things like Shout Cult and Kino Cult directly via their US Roku apps, although Roku boxes aren't quite as straightforward as other streaming devices to bring within a VPN.  There are still a few other of these aggregator apps on Roku and available in the UK, which provide access to otherwise unavailable channels and I'm now worried that someone might start targeting them in the wake of the cancellation of F2V TV.  Everyday I anxiously check my Roku home page to see if any of the other apps I have installed have vanished, (quite a few have gone this year, albeit mainly low quality ones).  Worrying times for us cheapskate seekers of obscure cinema.

An addendum: it does indeed seem as if the Airy TV app has only been removed from Roku's UK Channel Store.  A quick check via a VPN-enabled browser revealed that it is still available in the US Channel Store.  Which suggests that there might be rights issues over some of its content.  (Although, as noted, the Android version is still available in the UK, albeit with some non-loading content).