Dear Linux Pro Reader,

One news item that crossed the wires this month was the company known as Aereo closing its Boston office and laying off more staff. The move follows a supreme court ruling in June that left them without a viable means for gaining revenue. Although Aereo still seems to be afloat in some capacity, its prospects are few, and the new investment money necessary for a restart doesn't seem to be on the horizon.

If you just joined the conversation, Aereo was founded in 2012 on the concept of taking local broadcast television and putting it up on the Internet, so listeners around the world could stream it. Of course, many broadcasters already stream their own content, and it is illegal to just intercept somebody else's broadcast, stream it out to the world, and charge money to people who receive it. But Aereo had an interesting solution: they would not stream the signal to the world themselves but would, instead, assign exactly one antenna to exactly one listener. Their service would thus be a form of equipment rental – no different, their supporters said, from a pair of old fashioned rabbit ear antennas that used to go on top of a 1950s-era TV set, only the rabbit ears are in a different city. You could sit anywhere in the world and watch local broadcast TV from New York City. They designed a dime-sized TV antenna and built rack-mounted banks of thousands of these antennas, which they placed somewhere in Brooklyn.

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