Its system, Aereo has said, operates in much the same way as “a home DVR.” In other words, it is, according to Aereo, all about the choice of the ultimate viewer.

That choice is enabled by Aereo’s system, which maintains thousands of tiny antennas, mounted on circuit boards. Each paying customer logs on to Aereo’s website, picks out a program for reviewing, then decides whether to watch it then or record it for viewing later. The tiny antenna, said to be the size of a dime, is — for that transaction — used only by that single consumer.

A single copy of the desired program is made through the temporarily “rented” antenna, and it is then stored on a disk assigned to that customer, on a hard drive. The program is thus ready for the viewer, for “live” viewing (with only a few seconds of delay) or viewing later. “Those processes,” Aereo has summed up, “occur only at the direction of the user….From the beginning to the end of this process, the data stream received by an antenna is available only to the user who tuned the antenna by selecting a program to watch.”

To Aereo’s customer-is-king claims, broadcast TV networks and companies counter that it is Aereo that captures the free TV programs, and then uses its system to re-transmit them en masse. “Aereo is in the business of retransmitting broadcast television to thousands of members of the public, and has not obtained authorization to do so….Whether a retransmission service uses one transmission or ten thousand transmissions does not change the basic reality” that Aereo is “transmitting a performance.”

Tangential: This started me thinking about a Hubski equivalent. I can't find a good approximation, but it would be interesting if Hubski subscribed to countless RSS feeds, then served the feed content here rather than link to the post itself. In some cases, it might be an improvement from the reader's perspective.