Aereo Distributes Local TV Channels via the Internet

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The New York Times
Monday, September 17, 2012

Aereo Distributes Local TV Channels via the Internet

By JENNA WORTHAM

On the ninth floor of an old tire factory in Downtown Brooklyn, Joe Lipowski, chief technology officer of a company called Aereo, proudly showed off a steel sheet covered with TV antennas.

These were not your standard rabbit ears. They were thumbnail-size slivers, neatly arranged in rows. Behind Mr. Lipowski stretched rows of rectangular shelving units with dozens of sheets just like the first.

“There’s enough in here to accommodate a half million people,” he said. “And that’s just the beginning.”

The army of antennas is at the core of the ambitious service Aereo is introducing, first in New York and then across the country. Aereo picks up local broadcast channels like Fox and ABC and streams them over the Internet to mobile devices and TV sets. Its subscribers, who can record shows to watch later, pay fees starting at $8 a month.

Aereo executives say they are looking ahead to a future in which many “television” watchers have never had cable, or even a TV, and grab their favorite shows piecemeal from a number of online sources. In that sense they are joining the many other companies, including start-ups like Boxee and hardware juggernauts like Apple, that are trying to position themselves for the next wave of entertainment and media spending.

“The goal is not to recreate the cable companies but to create an alternative for people who are coming into television from the Net side first,” said Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s founder and chief executive. “There’s an emerging population of people who have never signed up for traditional cable packages, who are used to customizing their own TV experience.”

The rows of antennas are helping Aereo walk a fine legal line. Broadcasters want to shut the company down, claiming that it is violating copyright law.

Repackaging television transmissions without permission or payment would ordinarily be a blatantly illegal endeavor. But Aereo says it assigns each subscriber two antennas, allowing live viewing and recording at the same time, and lets a customer watch only the programming that those antennas pick up. It claims this is not so different from a person’s buying an antenna and a DVR at RadioShack and hooking them up to a TV at home.

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