Aereo had to pull down its services in Denver and Salt Lake City per a Utah court injunction.
Based in New York, Aereo was launched in February 2012. Aereo allows its subscribers to view live and time-shifted streams of over-the-air television shows on an Internet-connected device. The service was soon sued by a consortium of major broadcasters, which included CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox over copyright infringement.
However, in April 2013, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that Aereo's streams to subscribers were not "public performances" and did not constitute copyright infringement. However, the consortium did not sit back and in October 2013 sent a petition requesting the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the case.
According to an Aereo statement, on February 25, the District Court in Utah granted a preliminary injunction against Aereo in the Tenth Circuit of the U.S., which included Utah and Colorado. However, on Friday, March 7, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Aereo's request to stay the injunction, which means that the company will have to stop providing services to its customers in Salt Lake City and Denver markets beginning 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 8. The company hopes that the stop in service is temporary and will commence in the near term.
Aereo may have been forced to stop its service in Salt Lake City and Denver, but its service is still running in other markets such as Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Houston and more.
According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Chet Kanojia, CEO of Aereo, has issued an e-mail to its customers sharing his disappointment over the court order.
"We are extremely disappointed that the District Court in Utah has chosen to take a different path than every other Court that has reviewed the Aereo technology," wrote Kanojia in his e-mail. "Consumers have a fundamental right to watch over-the-air broadcast television via a modern antenna and to record copies for their personal use. The Copyright Act provides no justification to curtail that right simply because the consumer is using modern, remotely located equipment."
Aereo believes that its service by-passes copyright law by using thousands of tiny antennas built on a rooftop array in each market and each antenna is devoted to each customer. The antennas receive the free, local over-the-air broadcasts and then transmit those signals to the customer's device connected to the Internet. Customers have to pay a monthly subscription fee of $8 to $12 per month for the service.
