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Comment by eck | Hacker News Reader

Could Aereo pivot to selling a physical device that one would plug into a home router and do roughly the same thing?

That would be the right direction. From my understanding, there are devices like that now but the price points are higher up front and technical to set up. A plug and play approach with a monthly lease could work (assuming you can't actually make one for $30.) The bigger issue is, can this model scale and survive 5 years out? If it can not, it may be better to pull the plug.

This is a bigger loss to the TV stations than it is to Aereo users. How many Aereo users are going to go out and re-connect their televisions? Even if they do, the limitations can only reduce their viewing time. Friends who still have antenna televisions or were using Aereo largely did so because their wives liked to watch stupid reality TV shows. I never connected an antenna to my television. I have not had cable for three years. Broadcast TV stations could not make me a viewer if I was paid to watch. Between Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Youtube, and Twitch why would I choose to watch broadcast? It is only a matter of short time before the mass market sees it this way as well.

Between Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu, Youtube, and Twitch why would I choose to watch broadcast? It is only a matter of short time before the mass market sees it this way as well. reply

A few main reasons the mass market won't see it your way.

1. Sports - you can't generally stream sports in your local market.

2. TV shows don't hit those services usually until a year or so after their original air date.

3. There's a lot of TV viewing that happens more on a 'browsing' basis. Food Network, DIY, Discovery, a lot of the viewing that happens on these networks are because folks are just bored and scanning the channels. Non serialized shows like cooking or The Daily Show, have a hard time transitioning to the services you mentioned.

4. Cost effectiveness. Once you add up the cost of many of the services you mentioned the cost of monthly fees and individual show rentals is going to get very close to your normal cable bill.

TV shows on Hulu come out the day after (and usually on the network's website as well) except for some like Fox, who put it under subscriber-only for a week.

Just curious, do some of these devices work directly with a desktop/laptop device? Or possibly even a dongle for tablets/smartphones?

I remember seeing HKTV having these dongles which are fairly small and works pretty well with mobile devices. Maybe they can try that route.

Do home internet connections have the upload speeds necessary to make HD streaming viable, though? I don't think they do.

They don't. A full OTA stream (with no auxillary channels) is 18 megabits/sec. You'd need to transcode into something like H.264 before sending it up.

And what kind of hardware do you need to transcode 18 megabits/sec of video into H.264 in real time?

They have a pretty amazing infrastructure for cloud DVR and live streaming. I think a spin in the direction you propose would lose all the work and investment they've made in that area.

I think a more likely pivot would be along the "can't beat 'em, join em'" lines of selling these services direct to operators to power their TV Everywhere style streaming initiatives.

Dish is already spinning up a direct to consumer streaming service and I'm sure others would follow.

You've got it half right. Aereo could pivot to selling "the little antennas" just as they are. Aereo could then charge the antenna owners a "storage fee". And continue on as usual. Surely their lawyers will have thought of this.

However if an individual owns the antenna the legal question, already murky, becomes much harder because how could a decision make these personally owned antennas illegal while keeping antennas in the home legal?

("Hellbanned for Life." yeah, I know.)

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