By Al Lewis 

I always imagined Americans would get so hacked off about their pay-TV bills that they'd one day climb onto their rooftops, strap antennae to their chimneys and start watching network TV shows the way they used to be watched: free.

Aereo, a New York-based Internet startup backed by media mogul Barry Diller, wants to save them the trouble. For $8 to $12 a month, Aereo will rent consumers their own personal antenna and storage on computer servers. This will allow them to watch and record their favorite shows from any device: TVs, computers, tablets and even cellphones.

Understandably, the nation's giant broadcast companies don't like Aereo, because they get billions in fees from pay-TV providers. Aereo only makes it easier for people to get the signals that broadcasters send out free.

Broadcasters--including Comcast's NBC, Disney's ABC, CBS and 21st Century Fox--have been suing to stop Aereo. They've gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard their arguments last week. (Until June of last year, 21st Century Fox and The Wall Street Journal parent News Corp were part of the same company.)

Broadcasters argue that Aereo is illegally distributing copyrighted content. Aereo argues that it is only renting dime-size antennae and the cloud-computing equivalent of DVR space, allowing consumers to do what they can legally do in their homes, anyway.

The court is expected to decide the case this summer.

The Obama administration has filed a brief supporting broadcasters, marking the last time I will pay to watch President Obama on TV.

The National Football League also wrote in support of broadcasters. Yes, the tax-exempt pro-football league, making cities build its stadiums and gouging fans in every way imaginable, is coming down hard on Aereo.

Let's review some TV history here: Broadcasters were originally given monopolistic control of the publicly owned airwaves in exchange for providing free TV signals to the people. Advertisers paid for it and consumers suffered their stupid commercials. Eventually, though, consumers grew tired of the ads, so the once commercial-free cable-television industry was born.

Over the years, paid-TV rates grew exponentially faster than inflation. Paid providers started blasting out commercials, too. And now millions of Americans pay as much as $100 or more a month to be brainwashed by mind-numbing pitches. Enter Aereo.

Aereo won't drive pay-TV providers out of business. They, after all, provide Internet connections, too, and offer other programming.

Aereo won't drive broadcasters out of business, either. It will expand their audiences, making their advertising more valuable. Additionally, broadcasters could start their own Internet streaming services and undercut Aereo. Or they could take their precious programming off the public airways so Aereo can't get it.

They just don't want to. They like "disruptive technology" only when they can use it to disrupt someone else.

Aereo is a tiny company, and its services are available only in about a dozen cities. Its business model may not even work if it grows to millions of tiny antennae and fathomless terabytes of personally recorded TV shows. But for now it's getting free advertising.

The news has people who never heard of this innovative service turning to Aereo.com. Go check it out.

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