TV Broadcasters Warn of Huge Industry Shakeup If Barry Diller's Aereo Isn't Stopped

All of the major TV broadcasters are fighting a legal battle against Aereo, an upstart company backed by Barry Diller that seeks to distribute stations online to paying customers. If Aereo is successful in fending off the lawsuit, will cable and satellite distributors shake up their own approach to delivering TV to consumers?

Matt Bond, executive vp content distribution at NBCUniversal, told a New York federal court that the answer is an unequivocal yes. "It makes little economic sense for cable systems and satellite broadcasters to continue to pay for NBCU content on a per-subscriber basis when, with a relatively modest investment, they can simply modify their operations to mirror Aereo's 'individual antenna' scheme and retransmit, for free, over-the-air local broadcast programming," Bond says in a declaration. "I know for a fact that cable companies have already considered such a model."