Behind Aereo’s Decision to Throw the Long Ball to the U.S. Supreme Court

Yet late last week, Chet Kanojia, the Aereo CEO, declared in a statement that he welcomed the broadcasters’ appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, saying: “We want this resolved on the merits rather than a wasteful war of attrition.”

Part of the worry on Aereo’s side is the behavior of a somewhat unpredictable cousin, FilmOn X, based in Beverly Hills. That company says its technology is similar to Aereo’s. But FilmOn X, unlike Aereo, lost a round before a federal judge in the District of Columbia, who found in September that “FilmOn X is in no meaningful way different from cable television companies.” 

the mini-antennas are networked together so that a single tuner server and router, video encoder, and distribution endpoint can communicate with them all. The television signal is captured by FilmOn X and passes through FilmOn X’s single electronic transmission process of aggregating servers and electronic equipment. This system, through which any member of the public who clicks on the link for the video feed, is hardly akin to an individual user stringing up a television antenna on the roof.