MUMBAI: During Ad Age‘s Digital Conference Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia addressed the threat by CBS and News Corp to stop their channels from being free to air.
"The real question is a consumer question: Can you rightfully disenfranchise 50 million consumers? Is that what the preferred policy is?" he asked.
"They‘re independent businesses. They can choose to do what they wish to. I‘m just sort of the engineer at the bottom of the food chain. I have no idea what these guys do or not" he added.
Aereo pulls down over-the-air content by using an antenna. It then streams this content over the Internet to various devices. It plans to expand across the US.
It recently won victories in court.
He doesn‘t believe that Fox or any other broadcaster will follow on their threat to go to cable as their reach is great. "It‘s such a large audience, I don‘t see how those customers aren‘t going to get served".
But if the networks follow through Kanojia feels that other content service providers will replace them as public broadcasters. "That spectrum is incredibly valuable. Somebody‘s going to take advantage of that".
