Without Aereo’s DVR feature I probably wouldn’t have tried the service, but I am so impressed with it that I think I’m going to be a paying subscriber, despite the fact I don’t have compelling need for it. A key aspect of Aereo’s technology is its amazingly effective tiny TV antenna. Each customer gets one assigned to them within a huge array of tiny antennas. That way, Aereo can say they aren’t rebroadcasting TV stations for public use. It may sound clunky, but it isn’t at all. Assuming you have good Internet throughput, it’s all quite seamless and elegant. (Aereo’s opponents claim the antennas act in unison. Read this for more.)
When I started this blog in 2006 I had Comcast analog cable SDTV hooked into an ATI TV Wonder Elite DVR on my desktop computer. I lost the use of that cable tuner when I switched to FiOS digital HDTV. Since then I’ve seen the start of the Netflix streaming video service on Web browsers, then later it became available on the Roku player, and now there’s Aereo to put live TV back on my computer with dual monitors. Technology marches on!
