Aereo, the antenna company

As Aereo would describe itself, it’s kind of like a company that rents storage lockers to individuals–only it rents TV antennas.  Each customer has his own individual micro-antenna, located in a central antenna farm.  These micro-antennas receive the free over-the-air broadcasts from the major TV networks and retransmit them over the internet to a customer device, where TV programs can be viewed in real time.

If Aereo had started up ten years ago, this might not have been a big deal.  But in today’s world the TV networks collect hundreds of millions of dollars in annual retransmission fees from cable networks in return for allowing them to stream network content in real time to cable customers.  In the current cord-cutting environment, Aereo offers/ed an easy and cheap way for getting TV content (sports programming is the key) without having a cable subscription.

Aereo had two claims:

–it was acting just as if it were putting a rental antenna on each customer’s roof, only the antenna is located in a warehouse somewhere with good reception, and

–because each customer was choosing what to have streamed to him, even if there were copyright issues, the networks’ beef is with the individual customer, not Aereo.

prior lawsuits

The networks sued Aereo in Federal court in New York   …and lost.  They sued an Aereo knockoff  in Utah   …and won.

Both Aereo and the networks urged the Supreme Court to take the case and decide.

the ruling

The decision, 6 – 3 against Aereo, with the most conservative justices dissenting, came yesterday.

If I understand the ruling (don’t bet the farm that I do), the decision came in a way that Aereo hadn’t expected.

The majority said that back in the day, cable companies set up their own antennas to capture over-the-air network content and deliver it to cable customers without paying the networks for doing so.  Congress expressly made this illegal in 1976, through a revision to the Copyright Act .  So it didn’t matter if Aereo owned one humongous antenna or a gazillion teeny-tiny ones.  It also didn’t matter that the customer ordered his personal antenna to send the content or not.  All that mattered was that Congress outlawed delivering real-time network content without paying retransmission fees.

The majority also made a point of distinguishing real time delivery from time-shifting, where a customer records content for later viewing.

stock market implications

Take the Aereo IPO off your calendar for now.

It’s a big win for the broadcasters, protecting their cable retransmission fees for at least several years.

Unfortunately for them, it also leaves a lot up in the air.  We now know what Aereo can’t do, which is stream network content in real time, or with a brief delay.  But could it stream content with an hour lag?   …or the next day?  What about someone who records copyrighted content and shares it through Dropbox?  Is Dropbox responsible, or is it only the user who’s in trouble?

This case seems to show that operating through a big bunch of teeny antennas is colorful, but provided no legal protection.

My guess is that someone, maybe not Aereo, but someone, will try to revive the service, building in a time delay.  I’m not sure how much people would be willing to pay for time-shifted content, but my hunch is the audience would be surprisingly large.

Anyway, I think this possibility will prevent the content companies from running away to the upside.