Why Aereo’s Free Ride Will Ultimately Crash

One way or another, the road for Aereo will come to an end, at least with respect to getting its hands on valuable television programming without paying for it.

By any common-sense standard, Aereo is retransmitting local TV signals to devices over the Internet, reselling them to subscribers for a monthly fee. In that sense, it’s identical to cable or satellite TV operators, which under federal law must pay a fee to the broadcaster (unless the latter opts for “must-carry” designation). Even if Aereo were to win in the Supreme Court, broadcasters won’t give up the fight. Broadcasters could try to modify the law to explicitly cover services like Aereo’s (which could take years). They also have threatened to shift their most popular TV shows and sports programming to pay TV, or even convert broadcast stations to cable channels. Those are moves rife with political risk, given that the basic bargain of the government’s spectrum licenses to broadcasters is that they make TV free over the air. But if push comes to shove and Aereo and others are permitted to redistribute “free TV” at no cost, CBS or Fox would certainly put NFL games or popular primetime dramas on cable nets instead.