Aereo to Rise Again as…TiVo?

Aereo was one of those things was too good last and that was way ahead of its time. It was a cloud-based streaming DVR for broadcast stations that attempted to skirt the fees cable operators paid to them by setting up miniature antennas that the service claimed it was using to capture the over the air transmissions.

Smartphones and tablets could access it — if you subscribed and if you happened to live in one of the cities they set up shop in. Of course, cable companies and the broadcast stations hated it. Ultimately, it was the Supreme Court that shut them down.

Earlier today, it was announced that TiVo purchased Aereo’s trademarks and customer list in March for $1 million. Tom Rogers, TiVo’s CEO and president, announced his company was going to “kind of” bring back Aereo, “done legally and better.”

The company said it would make an announcement in the summer with regards to its plans. TiVo is one of the premium brands in the settop box/digital video recorder space and the best known. A cloud-based DVR service matched with TiVo’s user interface — which draws universal praise from its users — would be an amazing product that would theoretically be able offer access to anything that was shown on TV.

Could-based DVRs are a legal morass, however. Comcast offers its own cloud-based DVR product, the “X1 DVR with cloud technology“, which is usable by about half of the customers it services. However, because of the Aereo ruling, Comcast stores each customer’s recordings separately.

If TiVo has figured out how to satisfy the legal requirements the brought Aero down, it may have figured out how to stay current in an ever-changing entertainment sphere where a streaming platform means just as much, if not more than, hardware.

Via Multichannel News. Photo by Jamie McCaffrey/flickr.