As a reminder, Aereo built a series of antenna farms to gather local US TV broadcasts, then attempted to build a business based on rebroadcasting those signals over the net.
But we encountered significant challenges from the incumbent media companies.
While we had significant victories in the federal district courts in New York and Boston and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, the reversal of the Second Circuit decision in June by the U.S. Supreme Court has proven difficult to overcome. The U.S. Supreme Court decision effectively changed the laws that had governed Aereo’s technology, creating regulatory and legal uncertainty. And while our team has focused its energies on exploring every path forward available to us, without that clarity, the challenges have proven too difficult to overcome.
Accordingly, today, we filed for Chapter 11 reorganization proceedings.
You can read the full letter from Aereo on their new front page.
I don’t know the details of their filing, but you file chapter 11 to hide from your creditors. It’s unconscionable that they’ve known for a really long time that this would happen and now they’re stiffing other companies for the bill. It’s pretty pathetic in this country that companies use that as a business strategy. I’m particularly sensitive to this issue because it happened to me recently, and the assholes were still ordering work knowing full well they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay for it. It wasn’t a tiny amount, and I had to let an employee go. My company is small, think about the cost to some of these large companies that get screwed. Sorry to go on about this, but I know a lot of the thought here would be “poor Aero, they got screwed by the courts”. Maybe it’s a domino effect, but to me it’s poor management bordering on willful negligence. (I suppose I should read the filing, if I’m wrong and they don’t owe anyone, my comment borders on willful ignorance 🙂
It also sucks that they couldn’t make their idea work, but they based their entire business model on a loophole, one they pretty much knew would be closed, so you can’t feel too sorry for them… As always, were the ones that lose out, we’re still at the mercy of the TV broadcasters and Cable.