The US Supreme Court has ruled against the Internet TV service Aereo, saying that the service breaches the broadcasters copyright, deeming it to be similar to a cable company that is streaming content without a license. Founded by Indian born Chaitanya "Chet" Kanojia (a graduate of NIT, Bhopal), Aereo allows individual customers to receive broadcast shows via a small, individual digital antenna (leased by them, hosted by Aereo), store them on the cloud (essentially a Digital Video Recorder function), and then stream them to devices such as PC's, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku. How it works A server tunes an antenna, which is dedicated to the use of one subscriber alone, to the broadcast carrying the selected show. A transcoder translates the signals received by the antenna into data that can be transmitted over the Internet. A server saves the data in a subscriber-specific folder on Aereo’s hard drive and begins streaming the show to the subscriber’s screen once several seconds of programming have been saved. The streaming continues, a few seconds behind the over-the-air broadcast, until the subscriber has received the entire show. Each subscriber has a personal copy of the show that is streamed, received via a personal antenna. Customers pay for storage of the content, and not for the channels, and Aereo, since it picks up broadcasts off the air, doesn't have to pay channels. Customers essentially leased an individual antenna, which makes this different from an Internet streaming service. GigaOm has a fairly detailed overview of how…
