The app is essentially a re-launch and re-branding of the network’s older ABC Player app, but Watch ABC can still playback TV shows on demand, as well as stream live television. This makes ABC the first major broadcast television network to offer their own live TV streaming option in the US. However, the app only works in New York City and Philadelphia, but more cities are expected be added throughout the year.

With Aereo, you don’t need a cable subscription to watch live television, but the Watch ABC will require one by July 1. The app is currently open to anyone for the next few weeks, but ABC will soon require a cable subscription in order to have the ability to watch live ABC shows. You’ll need either a Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, AT&T U-Verse, Charter, or Midcontinent subscription.

After July 1, ABC plans to expand the app’s availability to more big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Raleigh-Durham, and Fresno. We’re guessing the app will exit its preview version and will be released in full on that date, but specifics are yet to be revealed on exactly what the plan is for Watch ABC.

As for the app being a viable competitor to Aereo, the effort is certainly there, but it’ll most likely be no cigar for ABC, and Aereo still includes some advantages over ABC’s live streaming options. Aereo doesn’t require a cable subscription to use, although you’ll have to pony up $8 per month in order to use Aereo, while ABC’s app is free. Watch ABC also doesn’t have DVR functionality, which may be an instant turn-off for some users. Overall, ABC is trying to offer something that’s cool and useful, but there’s simply too many restrictions still that is holding the network back.

SOURCE: iTunes App Store

Today’s announcement for expansion comes after Aereo recently unveiled new streamlined plans for its service, which would get rid of daily and annual plans in favor of two simple monthly plans. $8 per month would land you 20 hours of DVR storage space, while $12 per month will give you 60 hours of DVR space, which is 20 hours more than the previous $12 plan.

Aereo has been the center of a controversy since the launch of its streaming service. The company has been drawing criticism since users don’t need a cable subscription to watch broadcast television, as they can watch television on their mobile devices using Aereo’s service, which takes broadcast antenna signals and converts them into internet signals that the streaming app can digest.

Needless to say, Aereo has been sued multiple times by television networks, and the company already won in appeals court once. Plus, the lawsuits aren’t stopping the company from expanding its service to more cities. Aereo will launch service in Boston tomorrow, with Atlanta coming roughly a month later. The company plans to expand to 22 more cities in 2013, including Miami, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Cleveland, and Kansas City. Those are just some of cities that are planned to get the new service, with more to come in the future if the lawsuits don’t take down the company first.

Aereo has taken some heat from networks ever since the launch of its streaming television service over a year ago. Both CBS and News Corp. (owner of FOX) have taken aggressive steps in order to get Aereo banned, calling the company’s actions illegal, since they’re supposedly stealing broadcast antenna signals and using them for their own gain financially. It’s a sticky situation, indeed, and we’re not sure how much longer Aereo will be able to stay up, but if the courts are in favor of Aereo, broadcasts networks will need to think of a new strategy to retain viewers.

Aereo is also giving new customers one month free when they sign up, and since there aren’t any contracts or commitments to sign your life away, new users could basically use that first free month as a free trial if they’d like. This is certainly a smart move on the company’s end, as it gives potential users the opportunity to try out the service in depth without paying any money at first.

By moving down to just two plans, Aereo got rid of three of its previous options, including the one hour free trial, as well as the $1 per day plan and the $80 per year annual plan. The annual plan allowed to save more money by committing for a year, but the new plans give you more incentive to upgrade to the $12 per month plan, which offers 60 hours of DVR time, as opposed to just 40 hours.

The $8 per month plan stays the same, and you’ll get free month of service instead of just an hour of trial time. Overall, the plans are a lot more simplified, but they aren’t all that much better or cheaper. The only big difference is that the $12 plan gives you 20 hours more of DVR storage, which Aereo is hoping that most people will opt for. The new plans officially go into affect on May 15.

If you haven’t heard of Aereo before, or aren’t really sure what it’s all about, it’s essentially a service that brings live broadcast television to users over the internet by taking regular antenna signals and streaming them online for customers. The company has been in some heat with television networks, claiming that Aereo is taking away viewers illegally. However, Aereo remains to stay for now, and it’s continuing its expansion across the northeast US as well speak, just recently hitting Boston.

Boston residents will be able to pre-order Aereo service, which will give them access on May 15, while a wider public release for everyone in the Boston metropolitan area will take place on May 30. Aereo didn’t mention the reach that its service would have in Boston, but they do say that the service should be able to support around 4.5 million customers in 16 counties in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Aereo allows users to watch live broadcast television on their mobile devices and computers. In New York currently, users pay $12 per month to stream live TV programming from over 20 local broadcast networks, including CBS, NBC, and FOX. The controversy is how the company is doing it: they’re essentially yanking the broadcast signals using their own antennas and beaming it over the internet for users to enjoy.

Aereo was announced back in January, and while it’s only available in New York City for now, the company will be launching it services in numerous states throughout 2013, including Miami, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Cleveland, and Kansas City.

Television network CBS has also announced that it will consider pulling its programming from over the airwaves if Aereo continues to broadcast its signals to customers. CBS says that it would consider moving to a subscription only model in the New York area. If CBS made good on the threat it would mean that no one in the New York area would be able to access CBS programming using an antenna over the air.

Many see this as an empty threat because if Fox and CBS stock over the air broadcasts, it would mean that they would lose some viewers who don’t subscribe to cable and access programming exclusively over the air. A Fox executive previously claimed that the network needed to build a revenue stream model of retransmission fees and advertising to sustain its business.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves stated this week that he “wholeheartedly” supported Fox’s statements and that CBS had been in talks with cable operators about taking its broadcast signal off the air. The latest row in the Aereo saga came after a federal appeals court in New York upheld a lower court ruling in favor of the Aereo service. The service uses a network of small antennas to pick up over the air broadcast signals that it streams over the Internet to subscribers making the content viewable on just about any Internet connected device.

[via CNET]

Chase Carey, Chief Operating Officer of News Corp, stated,

Aereo is stealing our signal. We believe in our legal rights. We’re going to pursue those legal rights fully and completely, and we believe we’ll prevail. But we want to be clear. If we can’t have our rights properly protected through legal and political avenues, we will pursue business solutions. One such business solution would be to take the network and turn it into a subscription service.

Carey also stated,

“One option could be converting the Fox broadcast network to a pay channel, which we would do in collaboration with both our content partners and affiliates.”

Because Aereo has individual antennas picking up the broadcast signals, the court ruled that Aereo wasn’t retransmitting signals. It stated that Aereo was merely offering subscribers an option that they could already do with their own antennas. If the court did rule that Aereo was retransmitting the broadcast signals, it would most likely have to pay a fee to the TV networks.

Retransmission fees add up to billions of dollars in total each year, and are usually paid by companies that want to redistribute the networks’ programming to their subscribers. The court says that like Cablevision’s web-based RS-DVR, Aereo isn’t a video-on-demand service and isn’t retransmitting signals. It is merely storing individual copies of TV shows and providing them to the user who had requested them.

If Fox is converted to a subscription-based network, many popular TV shows, like American Idol, Glee, Family Guy, and X-Factor, will see a drastic hit in viewers. All of those shows are what made Fox so popular, so limiting the number of viewers who have access to them may backfire on Fox. Aereo charges a fee for its services. Fees range from $8-$12 monthly, and $80 for the entire year. We’ll keep you posted on how this case turns out.

[via Fox News]

That had been the subject of a lawsuit – and subsequent appeal – by copyright holders angry that Cablevision was hosting a copy of their movies and TV shows in the cloud without separate licensing. Cablevision argued (and won on the argument that) it was not a video-on-demand service, given it was recording individual copies of broadcasts for each user, and only if they had initially requested that recording.

Aereo’s system, the appeals court decided [pdf link], works in the same fundamental way. A copy per user is stored, rather than a single master from which all broadcasts are shown, and it is not a public broadcast.

“When an Aereo customer elects to watch or record a program using either the “Watch” or “Record” features, Aereo’s system creates a unique copy of that program on a portion of a hard drive assigned only to that Aereo user. And when an Aereo user chooses to watch the recorded program, whether (nearly) live or days after the program has aired, the transmission sent by Aereo and received by that user is generated from that unique copy. No other Aereo user can ever receive a transmission from that copy. Thus, just as in Cablevision, the potential audience of each Aereo transmission is the single user who requested that a program be recorded”

In fact, the appeals court compares the Aereo system and the precedent set by the Cablevision ruling in-depth, with particular emphasis on the fact that each user has dedicated access to a specific Aereo antenna. The minutiae of the 1976 copyright act – and the fact that the current media technology landscape differs significantly from the “environment of 1976″ – also gets investigated.

One member of the appeals court, Judge Chin, disagrees with the overall ruling, describing Aereo’s system as “a sham” and arguing that the antenna array is “a Rube Goldberg-like
contrivance, over-engineered in an attempt to avoid the reach of the Copyright Act and to take advantage of a perceived loophole in the law.” However, his opinion won’t provide much solace to the broadcasters, who now face a supreme court battle if they want to stop Aereo’s service.

That service could well get a kick thanks to today’s appeal court ruling. The cloud of litigation had reportedly been a thorn in Aereo’s expansion plans, which include chatter of a deal with AT&T and/or DISH. That could see Aereo service bundled with AT&T broadband plans, insiders claim.

[via The Verge]

Launched a little over a year ago, Aereo basically takes free-to-air TV content and rebroadcasts it as an internet stream. Subscribers are charged a fee – from $1 a day, for the commitment-averse, or through monthly or annual plans – for DVR functionality as well as access to two tuners for simultaneously watching and recording content.

However, even before it launched, Aereo was in the broadcasters’ legal sights. An initial lawsuit claiming the service broke laws by re-encoding content using its tiny antenna clusters was seen off, but the war is by no means over. A ruling in the appeals court is expected imminently, though a final settling of the arguments could be years off.

That uncertainty is apparently giving some potential partners pause for thought. According to the insiders, DirecTV considered partnering with Aereo, but opted not to after reviewing the legal situation. Dish Network, meanwhile, is another potential suitor, having already denied plans to buy Aereo, but conceded that it is following the service with interest.

As for AT&T, no confirmation was given, but sources say the talks are around AT&T selling broadband and/or mobile broadband that would be paired with Aereo service. Meanwhile, Aereo has supposedly approached a number of cable channel providers – at least two others, the sources say – in order to pay for access to select content, though no deals beyond the initial Bloomberg TV agreement have been inked.

Aereo offers a rather unique and exciting service, which provides users with access to live TV over broadband, no set-top box or cable subscription required. Users in the supported areas can subscribe to the service for $8 per month, $80 per year, or $1 per day, depending on needs. Users can get access to some major networks, such as NBC and CBS, as well as a local channels like NYC Life and children’s stations like Qubo.

Because the content is delivered over the Internet, it can be enjoyed on laptops, smartphones, and tablets, and supports Internet Explorer 9, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Apple TV, and Roku boxes. The company is rolling out the service to 22 other cities across the country, as well, including Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, Miami, and more.

In addition to announcing its service expansion, Aereo has also launched its first advertisement campaign. Those in the supported area will begin to see advertisements for the service across their city and neighborhood, including on billboards, over waterways, on commuter trains and in phone kiosks.

[via Aereo]

What you’ve got here is a set of plans that includes access to live, local TV, DVR storage space, remote antennas, and the ability to pause and rewind content. That’s a service that’s ready to shake the industry up. In addition to having several pricing structures on hand here and now, Aereo also offers a “try for free” plan which includes one continuous hour a day of streaming content – no strings attached.

As it turns out, early reviewers of this service have noted how difficult it is to get going with live TV without an iPad – but if you’ve got a PC or an Apple TV with Airplay and a MacBook Pro – you’re just as much in business as you’d normally be with any other web-based solution. Now that the internet-connected television portal to the earth is wide open, the solutions are pouring in. With Aereo, you’ve got not just streaming on-demand shows, you’ve got the same live TV that you remember from when you were a kid – or if you’ve had cable all this time, silly you.

At the moment you’ll have to be a resident of New York City to make Aereo work for you. If you’re outside of the city, you’ll have to wait for the tantalizing price of free all the way up to $80 USD a year with “three extra months for free.” You’ve got 40 hours of DVR storage space on the top two tiers of plans with the $8 a month plan starting in at 20 hours of space. That’s one whole heck of a lot of episodes of The Office – as the press images suggest.

It’s only a very preliminary victory. A federal judge dismissed the plaintiffs’ assertion to have Aereo shut down immediately. Instead, the service will at least remain live during the duration of the legal battle. What Aereo does is basically take a TV satellite and makes it Internet-enabled, allowing devices to stream live TV. We’re talking about over-the-air broadcasts here, not cable or satellite channels.

There are actually multiple lawsuits in process against Aereo so the plaintiffs as I’ve been referring to them are across more than one legal filing, but essentially every major decision will be parallel across these different lawsuits. In this specific case, filed principally by Fox, Tribune Company, PBS, and Univision, the plaintiffs released a statement saying, “Today’s decision is a loss for the entire creative community. The judge has denied our request for preliminary relief – ruling that it is ok to misappropriate copyrighted material and retransmit it without compensation. While we are disappointed, we will continue to fight to protect our copyrights and expect to prevail on appeal.” Aereo remains more confident than ever that its service is perfectly legal. It is currently up and running in New York City for iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers.

[via paidContent]

Here’s how it works: customers would still pay their normal monthly fees to satellite or cable providers. Nimble would then add on an extra charge to the customer to be able to stream their available channels, as well as offering unlimited DVR space. Think of it like a remote Slingbox, but with greater flexibility and additional functionality.

It doesn’t say in the press release which providers Nimble has managed to sign up, and there’s no pricing information either, but the company says the service is currently in private beta. Current beta users have access to a TV subscription with over a dozen channels, with more apparently being added as the beta goes on. Nimble say that final pricing will be announced “in the next few months.”

The company is hoping to avoid the sticky legal situation that Aereo has currently found itself in by working closely with television providers. New York TV providers claim that Aereo is committing copyright infringement by streaming publicly available terrestrial broadcasts over the internet while charging a fee.

[via PRNewswire]

Those companies had filed a lawsuit against Aereo last year, when they got wind of what exactly the new service would do. It takes existing free antenna TV and beams it through Wi-Fi to let users pick up the connection on their mobile phones. The other major networks, including CBS and NBC, have filed their own separate lawsuit against the startup, which is backed by huge investors.

The legal unrest comes down to whether or not Aereo’s service constitutes a “retransmission” of the TV broadcasts, something that isn’t clearly defined in the law as it stands now. In a statement, the company said, “Aereo merely provides technology that consumer may use to what they are legally entitled to do: (1) access free and legally accessible over the air television broadcasts using an antenna; (2) create individual, unique recording of those broadcasts for personal use.”

[via VentureBeat]

In one lawsuit, Aereo will have to face claims from Fox, Univision, PBS, and some local New York affiliate networks. In another lawsuit, ABC, NBC, and CBS are gunning after the same company. To say it will be a David vs. Goliath fight, which is the usual metaphor for an extraordinary fight where all the cards are stacked against someone, isn’t even a strong enough statement.

Today’s launch, though, proves that Aereo thinks it can survive. It isn’t an open-and-shut case, obviously. Aereo received more than $25 million in funding from very knowledgeable business people. The case will no doubt set legal precedent. Under the law, antenna signals can be transmitted to one device. The verbiage on what a “device” is, though, is sketchy. For now, check out Aereo for some free TV.

[via PaidContent]

So, unlike the FilmOn AIR tuner or the Elgato EyeTV, each of which can tune into free-to-air TV using a tuner physically connected to the device, each Aereo subscriber gets their own tiny antenna in one of the company’s centers. Those antennas can pick up HD-quality transmissions, assuming they’re available, and offer content from over twenty channels including shows from ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

Aereo Official Intro:

Your individual tuner streams the channel to an HTML5 app, which can be used in desktop browsers, on phones and tablets, and even on some smart TVs. The company expects its subscribers may still want to sign up to on-demand services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, but even with those fees included it still undercuts traditional cable.

However Aereo may face legal headaches from broadcasters over how, exactly, it’s using TV signals. The company isn’t simply offering a tuner, one lawyer told the LATimes, but is modifying the signal to suit distribution to phones, tablets and computers. That could see it fall foul of copyright laws, though no broadcaster has officially commented as yet.

The city-by-city roll out is a byproduct of the antenna cluster architecture, and Aereo isn’t saying when it might expand outside of NYC.