Broadcast spectrum ain't free. If you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in FCC license fees, and millions on mandatory local production (eg news operations) and network content licensing costs, you might look askance at it too. I really think the whole individual aerial thing with Aereo is bullshit.
If you had negotiated the right to hang a dime-size antenna of the Empire State building, with a home-brewed DVR accessible over the net, and then your friends and acquaintances had done the same thing, and eventually you had clubbed together and hired a janitor to keep an eye on the whole thing, so to speak, then it would have been a community thing that aggregated around a single point (a tall building where I imagine TV reception is good). Aereo is more of an astroturfing operation. It differs from your scenario in the same way that a housing subdivision built out by a developer differs from a village.
Does a viewer suddenly become "not local" if the signal gets to their house through the internet instead of an antenna?
The studios aren't concerned that someone will switch from an antenna to Aeveo, they're worried that someone will switch from cable to Aeveo. Even broadcast channels have been getting into the re-transmission fee game and they don't want to give it up. Frankly, I'm not worried that their business model is being disrupted.
The other issue is that ratings aren't well tracked for streams. This is more a problem that Nielson or someone similar needs to correct but it is a problem. And unless/until Aeveo viewers are counted in the ratings the broadcasters get no benefit from their existence.