Broadcasters Demand Barry Diller Explain $20.5 Million Aereo Investment

Television networks seeking to dismantle a startup that delivers over-the-air broadcasts via the internet want to know what the hell Barry Diller, the chairman of the IAC/InterActiveCorp media empire, was thinking when his company invested $20.5 million in to a legally questionable startup called Aereo. So much so, they dropped a subpoena on Diller to that effect.

The demands are part of a lawsuit brought by ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS and others that want a federal judge to shutter Aereo, which opened for business last month and delivers unlicensed internet streams of the broadcasters’ shows for a monthly fee. The legal maneuver is reminiscent of the Napster trial, in which the recording industry targeted the formerly renegade music-sharing service’s deep-pocketed investors — eventually securing about $200 million in damages from the likes of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Attorneys for Diller and other investors are crying foul, saying the broadcasters’ subpoenas are “patently overbroad” because they seek “confidential investment decisions and analyses that are extremely sensitive and should not be produced to any of the parties in the litigation.”