Aereo CEO Wants to Hit ‘Every Major City'
Emboldened by Aereo’s victory in federal appeals court earlier this week, CEO Chet Kanojia says the disruptive video service will continue with a roll out that he says will have Aereo in 22 markets by the end of the summer.
Currently available in New York, Aereo will announce its next launch market in the next week or so.
“We’ll make sure we’re meeting expectations in terms of product quality and consumer satisfaction,” Kanojia tells B&C. “But we do want to hit every major city.”
Kanojia saluted the appeals court for displaying what he called a “thoughtful” level of understanding behind Aereo’s technology and operating philosophy, which involves streaming stations’ signals over the air via a giant batch of tiny antennas. “I’m very grateful,” he said.
Local broadcasters are fighting hard to keep Aereo, which does not pay to retransmit their content, out of the picture. The legal battles will continue.
Kanojia won’t say how many New York subscribers Aereo has, and was also mum on the topic of Aereo partnering with cable, satellite and telco operators about potentially bundling its video product with the MVPD’s broadband services-another nightmare scenario for broadcasters.
“With the nature of our company and what we do, there’s a ton of interest in our company,” Kanojia says.
Aereo has a “strict filter” as to whom it might work with, adds Kanojia: “We ask, what is the consumer benefit for working with these partners?”
Muddy Mudskipper commented:
The notion that "WiFi is essentially everywhere" is a ridiculously misleading statement. Most WiFi networks are password protected and unavailable for use with Aereo. And 4G is both not up to the task and capped for most folks. Aereo for use outside the home sucks unless you are stationary and near a free WiFi hotspot. Very few people will pay $8 a month for it.
KyL commented:
You're missing the entire point of my post, I'm not saying the service Aereo provides doesn't have potential, it's just that their entire presentation of the technology behind their product is a lie. They do not have unique streams for each user, their so called "Live DVR" is something built into the open source Strobe Media Player, and each user does not have their own antenna. It's Physics 101, that tiny antenna alone cannot get reliable reception of stations in the VHF band. (I'd love to see them pull that claim when they launch in Philly where they have two stations in VHF-Lo) Essentially they just mashed them all together to form a giant antenna bay, stuck it on the roof in Broooklyn and attached it to ATSC tuners for each channel. What they claim is that each subscriber has their own dedicated antenna and tuner which is clearly false as I was able to watch multiple channels at the same time and the only unique thing about the url was the expiring auth token, the actual encoder each user connects to is the same.
Videographer commented:
Sorry, KyL, but you are not seeing the possibilities of Aereo. Right now the NAB is trying to force whip antennas onto cellphones and iPads to receive a signal that will crimp the bandwidth of broadcasters. In the meantime, WiFi is essentially everywhere. If the NAB and Aereo teamed up to become the defacto mobile broadcaster in the USA, TV stations would be mobile immediately and no user would have to strap a dongle on their smartphone. This can be a win-win, if the NAB only lets it be that.
KyL commented:
Aereo's technology is a joke. The antennas work together as a giant bay, there's no way one of them acting alone can receive reliable reception of the VHF band. The Live DVR function is something built into Strobe Media Player and works with any flash based stream and is used by other sites around the world like RTE and the BBC. The streams are not unique to each user, they're all on the same servers and just use auth codes. I was able to watch multiple channels at the same time by getting the urls from the media cache file on my iOS device.