At first glance, the only merit of the Brooklyn office of the television startup Aereo—a relatively austere space located on the ninth floor of an oppressively bland, grey building in Clinton Hill—is the sweeping view of the skyline, from eastern Brooklyn to Manhattan. But the clear line of sight—straight to midtown—from its north-facing windows isn’t meant for the enjoyment of its employees: it serves Aereo’s thousands of tiny antennas, which are pressed against the glass to capture broadcast television signals beamed primarily from the top of the Empire State Building.
Aereo, which was founded in 2012, acquires television content the old-fashioned way: its antennas are small, but they work like the rabbit ears that used to be on top of television sets. This allows the company’s subscribers, who pay around eight dollars a month for the service, to watch television freely broadcast by local stations. Each subscriber is assigned an antenna; when she wants to watch, say, NBC, it tunes in to the correct frequency. The signals, once captured, are converted, cached on a bank of DVRs, and are finally passed to users’ tablets or phones over the Internet.
There is something at once archaic and new in the company’s orientation toward the Empire State Building. On April 30th, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opening speech for the World’s Fair was beamed from the tower, then itself barely a decade old, by the experimental NBC television station W2XBS, marking the start of regular television programming. A few weeks later, the first televised sports event, a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton universities, was also broadcast from the tower. According to a
Talk of the Town story published in The New Yorker in May of that year, viewers had “considerable trouble following the ball…and suffered in addition from eyestrain.”
Television screens then were small, with relatively poor resolution. The analog transmissions of the time were also less efficient than the all-digital television signals broadcast in the United States today; those modern signals, Aereo says, make it possible to tune in to channels using an antenna the size of a coin. The antennas are so small because Aereo needs to fit a great many of them in a compact space, since it has one for each subscriber. The tiny, individual antennas are as much a legal innovation as a technical one. Virtually since its inception, the company has been forced to defend its business model in court. The main question is whether the company should be paying broadcasters to retransmit their content, as cable providers do, or whether Aereo is just, as it claims, offering what can be considered a very long wire between the subscriber’s antenna and screen. (Michael Phillips laid out the controversy in a recent post.) Oral arguments in a Supreme Court case between Aereo and several major broadcasters are scheduled to begin next month.
