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Comment by gtCameron | Hacker News Reader

Reading that makes me wonder how they actually make any money. $8 a month per subscriber seems pretty low for the hardware and bandwidth involved per stream.

Even if you count on only a certain percentage of people watching at any given time you need to account for the high volume events where 80% of your customer base would be watching the Super Bowl for example.

The more I think about it the more it seems like the company's purpose is more about forcing this court case than actually building a sustainable business.

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They say "subject to capacity" all over their site so I have a feeling if everyone in town is trying to watch the Super Bowl some people aren't going to be able to.

I have a feeling they're hoping that long-term they'll be able to ditch the one-antenna-per-stream nonsense. With that one tiny (!) little tweak it suddenly becomes wildly profitable.

> I have a feeling they're hoping that long-term they'll be able to ditch the one-antenna-per-stream nonsense. With that one tiny (!) little tweak it suddenly becomes wildly profitable.

For a short time, maybe. But such a court ruling would basically declare open season on broadcast content, such that anybody would be able to quickly start an Aereo competitor and retransmit OTA television. With AWS, it would be a cinch. So the price of the service would quickly drop to nothing.

I strongly disagree that this would be "a cinch". If AWS were suitable for this, why would Aereo themselves be using rooms full of transcoders instead of the cloud? I think the only people willing to make the investment in Aereo-like infrastructure are existing cable and satellite TV companies, looking to escape retransmission fees. But they it seems unlikely they'd want to unbundle that from their non-OTA content.

Aereo has to maintain the pretense that they're just "renting out" a time-shifting DVR. That's why they need rooms full of transcoders. But the premise of the comment 'evan_ made is what if the law was changed so they didn't need to maintain that pretense? In that case, Aereo's costs would go down, but it would also become ridiculously easy to start a competitor.

I don't think anyone is under the impression that anything about the model of charging retransmission fees for one-to-many streaming is going anywhere. If it did, then sure, cable companies could do what they do today and simply not pay fees. But that possibility isn't even on the table right now.

I don't think DVR fundamentally has anything to do with the transcoding. You could just store and time-shift the native stream and get rid of the transcoders. I suspect that the transcoding is done primarily to conserve bandwidth.

To me, the DVR is pretty much a settled question under Cartoon Network vs. Cablevision [1]. The real question is whether Aereo is allowed to rent you an antenna.

[1] http://betanews.com/2009/06/29/cable-dvrs-are-legal-supreme-...

You would no longer need "a room full of transcoders".

You would have a control plane that would determine what people were watching (a la Netflix), and then use RTMP, HLS, HDS, DASH, etc to serve "channels" across your CDN, and subscribe end-user devices to these channels.

Disclaimer: I work for a news startup majority-owned by a major market broadcaster.

True, Aereo would probably still have an advantage just because they'd have a more mature product and some market share.

It's already established that without one-antenna-per-stream, it is considered a public performance of copyright content, and therefore the content must be licensed. This is how it works with the cable TV providers.

I've wondered this as well. The market seems really limited - people who are savvy enough to know about/use Aereo but are content with occasionally watching just a handful of broadcast networks...who aren't really producing the shows savvy people are buzzing about these days. Aereo's legal bills must be insane and the infrastructure looks expensive since everything is custom. Even if they win in the courts, what additional doors does that open up? It's not like cable networks will suddenly want to get in bed with them.

>$8 a month per subscriber seems pretty low for the hardware and bandwidth involved per stream.

USB DVB-T dongle is $7 with free shipping. So they simply CANT spend more on hardware when it is that cheap with cots parts.

Thats less than half of the equation. They still have to get the signal to a transcoder, transcode the stream, store it on a "personal DVR" for each customer, and then stream it to you.

You will be transcoding hundreds of SAME streams. If they are at least a little bit smart they implemented shared intermediate data pool = you transcode them individually, but you reuse all the calculations = only one set of calculations per one Multiplex, rest pooled from cached data.

Areo offers service to people in radio shadows.

Haven't you heard? Companies don't have to make money anymore, just have to keep climbing the evaluation ladder until they get acquired by a company with a big enough purse to bail out.

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