At Stake in the Aereo Case Is How We Watch TV

[Commentary] The Aereo case has technology aficionados and media reporters in a tizzy, partly because it has a little bit of everything: legacy media hanging on to cherished business models, an insurgent with a crafty workaround and perhaps most important, the first big test at the Supreme Court of who owns and has rights to things that are stored in the cloud.

If the Supreme Court chooses to bring Aereo to heel, it does not want to break the Internet in the process. Even if Aereo wins, its business path is uncertain. Will consumers pay even small amounts of cash for a service that doesn’t have “The Walking Dead,” “SportsCenter” or “Shark Week”? Then again, few ever gave Aereo a shot of going anywhere because of an approach to streaming content that gave a cut of exactly zero to those who produced it. Yet there Aereo was, before the highest court in the land, doing its best to explain to nine justices who grew up watching “M*A*S*H” over rabbit ears that television is in the middle of a jailbreak, and there is no going back.