Aereo is doing almost exactly what cable television once did, putting a radio receiver on one end of a cable and a bunch of customers on the other. (I assume that cable companies probably have direct physical links to local stations by now, but it's not relevant). The fact that their transmission medium is the web rather than coax seems inconsequential to me.
That seems to fall on the `movie theater' end of the dichotomy, but it's legal.
> Aereo is doing almost exactly what cable television once did, putting a radio receiver on one end of a cable and a bunch of customers on the other.
No, Aereo is putting a radio receiver on one end and one customer on the other. Each customer has their own antenna. It's exactly the same as having an antenna on your home TV, only you're renting the antenna and it comes with a DVR.
And if they used one antenna and hooked it up to multiple DVRs, would it be any different from a technical standpoint? The same signal is transmitted, the same broadcast is collected, and the same set of users get to view the same content in the same way. The intent of the legislation wasn't pushed for by the Antenna Maker Lobby(tm) to maximize the number of antennas in the world. It was to prevent a middleman from doing a mass reselling of over the air content without paying licensing fees.
If one is legal, the other should be as well. And if one is illegal, the other should be as well. Anything else would be insane. IMO, both should be legal.
Yes, and in 1992 the law was changed to require cable companies to get retransmission consent in order to engage in that practice (usually by paying fees).
That seems to fall on the `movie theater' end of the dichotomy, but it's legal.