The Cloud Industry Needs Aereo to Win. But Consumers Need Something Better.

[Commentary] The best way to think about Aereo, the company at the center of this week’s Supreme Court battle over the future of computing, is as an example of legal performance art.

Aereo is based entirely on a legalistic leap of faith: If it’s legal to set up an antenna and record a TV show at your own house, which it is, shouldn’t it also be legal to rent an antenna and server space at a big data center, and then stream the show over the Internet to your computer, tablet or set-top box?

It’s a clever argument, one that highlights the extreme lengths that tech companies go to in order to avoid copyright restrictions. The argument is designed to show off the similarities between Aereo and more traditional cloud services like Dropbox -- services that the Supreme Court would have to strive mightily to separate out of any ruling against Aereo.

But for all its cleverness, Aereo is also a gimmick. Aereo is a for-pay, middleman service whose sole function is to let you stream TV shows that are already freely available over the air. For consumers, the best outcome of this case is for Aereo to win, and then scare broadcasters into streaming their content directly to users, either for free or for a lower price than Aereo charges.