New York Times

Aereo, the start-up firm that threatened to upend the television industry, has hit the pause button.

Three days after the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and transmitting them to subscribers for a fee, the company suspended its service.

“We have decided to pause our operations temporarily as we consult with the court and map out our next steps,” Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s chief executive, said.

Aereo said that the service would not be available after 11:30 a.m. on June 28 and that it would give users a refund for their last paid month. The company had fewer than 500,000 subscribers in about a dozen metropolitan areas.

The day after the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo in a copyright case brought by the nation’s major broadcasters, Mark Ely was trying to scoop up Aereo customers by promoting his start-up, Simple.TV, on social media.

“Former Aereo customer? Join the Simple.TV Family,” the company wrote on Twitter. “We’re telling Aereo customers: ‘Your favorite service is going away. Here’s an idea that isn’t,’ ” Ely, who started his company in 2011, said.

The television establishment still has much to worry about after its Supreme Court victory over Aereo, the digital start-up that had threatened to upend the economics of the media business. “Television is a castle filled with money,” said Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy and innovation officer at Vivaki, the Publicis Groupe’s digital marketing unit. “People are trying to get into that castle and take some money.”

Eager for a piece of the $167 billion American television market, dozens of companies are offering options for the growing number of viewers known as cord cutters, who are canceling their traditional pay-television subscriptions. The providers range from Hulu, which the broadcasters own, to bigger services like Amazon, Google and Netflix, all of which offer cheaper streaming alternatives.

Every cable TV network needs one thing to thrust itself into the consciousness of viewers: a signature show that attracts ratings and passionate advocates.

Since March 2014, WGN, a channel that has lacked an identity for much of its more than three decades, has scored an unusual success with its first original drama, “Salem,” generating strong reviews and positive word of mouth. Too bad it is not a cable network.

Not yet, anyway. WGN America, as it is now called, is among the few remaining “cable superstations,” holdovers from cable’s early days when a few large local broadcast stations, relying mostly on sports -- like Chicago Cubs games on WGN -- carved out niches on cable systems, though they were not categorized as cable networks.

“Salem” is the first step in a strategy by the Tribune Company, owner of WGN America, to transform the superstation into a full-fledged cable network, creating yet another competitor in the increasingly crowded field of purveyors of distinctive television drama. Next up, in July, is “Manhattan,” a drama about the secret work to develop the atom bomb.

The number of homes in the United States that subscribe to Internet service has grown at a 15 percent annual rate over the last decade, to 85 million. But as much as 30 percent of households do not have a connection faster than dial-up speed, according to government figures just released.

In its semiannual report on Internet Access Services, the Federal Communications Commission found that as of June 30, 2013, roughly 70 percent of households had fixed Internet connections of at least 0.2 megabits per second, a rather slow speed but generally faster than dial-up. Most people with Internet connections have even faster speeds, however. About 54 percent of all households can download data or video at a rate of three megabits per second or better.

The FCC defines broadband, or high-speed Internet service, as having a minimum download speed of four megabits per second. The figures show a stubbornly persistent digital divide in this country between households that subscribe to Internet service and those that do not. Other figures in the report show that Internet adoption rates grow along with income and education. In addition, city dwellers are more likely to subscribe to Internet service than are residents of less-populated areas.

[Commentary] The two major technology-related decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this week have been widely greeted by people in the tech industry as one win and one loss.

The win involved cellphone privacy: The court, siding with tech policy advocacy groups, ruled that the police must obtain a warrant to search the phones of people they arrest.

The loss was Aereo, the brazen TV streaming start-up. The court ruled against the company, which created a cablelike service without paying broadcast networks for the rights to their content.

But when you examine the rulings, a different conclusion emerges. These were both wins for the industry, because they revealed something that should be quite gratifying for every technologist: The Supreme Court understands technology.

At a broad level, it understands the Internet and how the worldwide network has transformed our understanding of the law. More than that, the justices (aided, surely, by their Snapchatting clerks) seem to understand some of the deeper distinctions between various kinds of tech, distinctions that are vital to how we should regulate the gadgets now infiltrating our lives.

The New York City region’s major airports will finally offer free Wi-Fi to travelers, but the generosity has a time limit: 30 minutes. Amid a spate of calls to upgrade its facilities -- Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. recently likened La Guardia Airport to the hub of a “third world country” -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved a measure that it said would bring the airports into conformity with others around the globe, at least on this count.

Under a modified agreement with Boingo, a wireless Internet provider, travelers will receive 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi and then can pay for
additional access “in hourly, daily or monthly increments,” the agency said. A Boingo subsidiary will pay an estimated $3.8 million “to support the upgrade,” the authority said, recouping the expense “through a cost-share arrangement with the Port Authority.”

In a decision with far-reaching implications for the television industry, the Supreme Court ruled that Aereo, a start-up streaming service, had violated copyright laws by capturing broadcast signals on miniature antennas and delivering them to subscribers for a fee.

The 6-3 decision was a victory for the major television networks, which had argued that Aereo’s business model amounted to a theft of their programming. The judges’ ruling leaves the current broadcast model intact while imperiling Aereo’s viability as a business after just over two years in existence.

In arguments before the court in April, the broadcasters contended that Aereo and similar services threatened to cut into a vital revenue stream -- the billions of dollars they receive from cable and satellite companies in retransmission fees, the money paid to networks and local stations for the right to retransmit their programming. The networks said this revenue was so essential that they would have considered removing their signals from the airwaves had the court ruled for Aereo.

The start-up contended that the service it provided through warehouses of small antennas was merely helping its subscribers do what they could lawfully do since the era of rabbit-ears: watch free broadcast television delivered over public airwaves. Both Barry Diller, who heads Aereo owner IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia have expressed doubt about whether Aereo could remain in business if the Supreme Court ruled against it.

German book publishers have formally accused Amazon of violating the country’s competition laws and have asked the antitrust authorities to investigate.

The formal complaint comes nearly two months after Amazon stopped shipping books from a leading German publisher, the Bonnier Media Group, amid a dispute over dividing revenue from e-book sales.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association said it had submitted its complaint to the Bundeskartellamt, the federal antitrust authority, laying out what it viewed as Amazon’s abuse of its market-dominant position in Germany and urging the officials to take action against the Seattle-based company.

China introduced new restrictions on what the government has called “critical” news articles and barred Chinese journalists from doing work outside their beats or regions, putting further restraints on reporters in one of the world’s most controlled news media environments.

Reporters in China must now seek permission from their employers before undertaking “critical reports” and are barred from setting up their own websites, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television announced in new rules. The state agency said on its website that the rules came after a series of cases involving misconduct by journalists, including extortion.

But journalists and rights activists said the rules could have a chilling effect on reporting in China, a country already ranked 173rd out of 179 countries on the press freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders.

T-Mobile US, the fourth-largest American phone carrier, has spent the last year and a half introducing aggressive new offerings to lure customers. Most recently, the company said it would add to those offerings with unlimited streaming music and the ability to test-drive an iPhone.

The company’s moves have helped attract millions of people to T-Mobile. And they have also impressed federal antitrust regulators, who have publicly patted themselves on the back for resisting a potential merger between T-Mobile and AT&T in 2011.

Now, T-Mobile is in talks with Sprint, the third-largest carrier, for a $32 billion merger. A deal could be announced this summer.

William Baer, the chief of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, noted that the effect of regulators blocking the AT&T and T-Mobile merger was “driving enormous benefits in the direction of the American consumer.”

But John Legere, T-Mobile’s chief executive, said that innovation and competition would only intensify with a merger.

T-Mobile said that it had teamed up with popular streaming music services including Pandora, Slacker Radio, Spotify, Rhapsody and Apple’s iTunes Radio. Music streamed from those services will not be counted against a user’s data plan.

All T-Mobile customers subscribed to its current plans, called Simple Choice, will be eligible for the free streaming.

T-Mobile also said that it would introduce UnRadio, a new online radio service with Rhapsody. Unlike many traditional Internet radio services, UnRadio will be an ad-free service that allows people to listen to specific songs and skip others as much as they want. It will be free for customers subscribed to T-Mobile’s unlimited data plans and $4 a month for other T-Mobile customers.