Aereo swooped in and saved me last year. I was in the middle of a New York City breakup, which meant moving into a tiny apartment and giving up the fancy smart television and expensive cable bundle that only two working adults could afford.
How was I going to watch “60 Minutes” on Sundays? You can take your companionship, but do not take my Sunday night CBS. I was already a subscription video streamer: I had the big three. My best friend gave me her HBOGo login. Aereo rounded it out. I paid extra so I could DVR more than one show. A woman really could have it all.
But it always felt like one day I was going to try to log in and the site would disappear, like if you stayed in Europe before you could get Netflix and had to use those weird, illegal streaming websites that offer porn and every “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” season on the same homepage (can we say Megavideo?). But Aereo just had “Downton Abbey” and “Good Morning, America.” It meant no harm. This is all to say that when Aereo lost their battle this summer, I took it personally. I bought a TV and cheap cable bundle. Last week, when they filed for bankruptcy protection, I knew it was really over.
If this were a Muppet movie, I would lead the gang to fight the big, bad, networks and make the Supreme Court rethink that transmit clause just in time to stream the “Charlie Brown Christmas” broadcasts and live happily ever after. But this is the real world, broadcasting corporations are people, copyright laws will never evolve, and streaming content (for eight dollars!) is for crazy hippies.
Unlike most startup CEOs, Chet Kanojia isn’t a megalomanic (from what I’ve read). He really believes. The emails he sends to his customers make it clear: we’re not just talking about streaming video, we’re talking about changing the whole, televised system. One day, Kanojia. One day.
Which is why someone should take a hint. CBS started their own subscription service and that’s great. ESPN’s trying. But that is a ridiculous trend to invest in. Do you want that, as a consumer? It’s not necessarily a la carte that the market wants. It’s convenience. From a Time piece “A TV Network Should Buy Aereo:”
What I have trouble moving past is that Aereo wasn’t really charging for content, as everything you could watch on the service was free anyway. It was charging for convenience —You could watch Aereo on a laptop or iPhone, and it gave customers access to a cloud-based DVR to store their favorite shows. It also made up for the fact that, here in building-packed New York City at least, the free, over-the-air broadcasts are often difficult to watch with a regular TV aerial. Most of the people I know who used Aereo here did so because they couldn’t get reliable signals from the broadcasters. In this sense, Aereo addressed a technical failure, too. With those factors combined, Aereo was certainly worth eight bucks a month.
Like big cable providers, no one cares about a network’s brand. “The New Girl” could be on NBC for all your little cousin knows, even if FOX is in the Twitter handle (try her this Thanksgiving). Hulu is nice, but it’s not immediate (and you can’t watch CBS!). Building little, walled television gardens not going to work in the long run. Big broadcasters: ask your friends in the news publishing biz if it was worth holding onto that old business model in the long run. Would they have done anything, anything at all, a little differently?