Free for a Fee

In the year before Aereo launched, chief executive Chet Kanojia held meetings with executives from the broadcasters who would later sue his company. He explained the idea behind the company: renting a tiny antenna to each customer would keep it within the bounds of copyright law while allowing users to have a host of features usually only available to cable subscribers.The idea was to use the Internet and cheap cloud storage to give new life to a way of watching TV that was fading: free, over-the-air broadcasts. Put the antenna in the cloud, add the kind of recording and storage abilities that consumers came to expect with television, and offer it at a fraction of the price of a typical cable subscription.

“Their reaction was no reaction,” Kanojia recalled in an interview with Ars. “It was, hmm, interesting.”