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Who exactly is Aereo’s target market? Who’s going to pay them $8 a month to watch broadcast TV — but only broadcast TV — on the Web? CEO Chet Kanojia sketched out a rough sense of his customers. Half of them, he said, are either cord-cutters or cord-nevers — people who used to have cable TV or have never signed up for it — and half are people who are still paying for cable.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people's emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request. In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users "do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications." A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy. Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, government officials only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to read emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old. Privacy groups such as the ACLU argue that the Fourth Amendment provides greater privacy protections than the ECPA, and that officials should need a warrant to access all emails and other private messages.

Aereo — and the court’s rejection so far of broadcasters’ request to stop it from streaming their content for free — could ultimately be a major impediment to already complex retransmission consent negotiations.

“Aereo is totally disrupting the marketplace,” says BIA/Kelsey Group VP Mark Fratrik. Resolving the Aereo issue, which broadcasters’ plan to continue pursuing in court, is one of the biggest issues facing them in the year ahead, says Fratrik, speaking at the NAB Show in Las Vegas. A non-paying streaming service like Aereo could “break the foundation” of the retransmission consent process between broadcasters and paid TV providers including cable and satellite companies, Fratrik says: “There is a possibility of dramatically affecting the rev stream that is important to local television stations as well as the networks.”

Gannett, New York Times and other newspaper publishers are finding that consumers are willing to pay for online subscriptions for access to local news content, according to a report from Borrell Associates Inc.

Gannett, the owner of daily newspapers including USA Today, had 46,000 online subscriptions at the end of 2012, two-thirds of which were new readers, the Williamsburg, Virginia-based researcher said in a report being released today. Times Co. last year generated more revenue from circulation than from advertising -- in part because it “led the way” charging for online access, Borrell said. Times Co., Gannett and others have been building these so-called paywalls in an effort to make up for lower advertising sales and print subscriptions. Still, only about 25 percent of all newspapers had done so by the first quarter, Borrell said. Papers have held off on paywalls amid concerns that readers would stay away, leading to a drop in ads. Yet research shows that after an initial decline, readership gradually returns to pre-paywall levels after 12 to 14 months, Borrell said.