Free TV? And with just a stamp-sized antenna?

Aereo, the brainchild of an Indian-American innovator, brings television content to your devices for free. Is this legal?

An India-born entrepreneur and his pathbreaking innovation are up against the laws in the United States. The case in the US Supreme Court is as much a commentary on the pace with which technology changes as it is about corporate protectionism. Well, the man is 43-year old Chaitanya Kanojia, more popularly known in the US media as Chet Kanojia.

Kanojia's Aereo, a two-year-old firm in Boston, has come up with tiny television receivers the size of a thumbnail. What this tiny device allows users to do is to pick up for free television signals from over-the-air broadcasts and play the content not on television sets, but on compatible devices like phones and tablets. Currently, Aereo offers services in 11 cities, including New York, Dallas, Boston and Miami. It wants to expand to more metropolises, but the broadcasting companies have taken him to court, saying Aereo illegally retransmits television signals without paying for them.

Each subscriber to Aereo, on paying a monthly subscription of $8-12, gets access to free television shows as well as a facility that enables them to record shows for later viewing. They are assigned two tiny antennae - one accesses TV programmes, the other facilitates access to Aereo's Digital Video Recorder (DVR) technology. The user does not hook the antennas to his displays, whether it be a computer, iPhone, iPod, tablet or an Android device. Instead, the antennae are stored in arrays at Aereo's data centres. They enable streaming through the Internet on the devices of users. Those who have subscribed to the service say Aereo is cost effective, since a cable connection costs around $100 a month. However, the quality of what they see on their devices depends on data speeds, and many have complained of buffering delays.

Essentially, the technology consists of a miniaturised receiving antenna, a much tinier version of the fishbone contraption we used to install on rooftops or the twin aerials that smaller TVs came equipped with. Aereo receives signals only from over-the-air broadcaster. The receivers are incapable of cutting into cable or satellite transmissions. If it was being used in India, for example, it would only catch Doordarshan signals which are terrestrially broadcast.

A clutch of companies that still broadcast over the air, including NBC, Fox, ABC and CBS, have sued Aereo because they feel their signals are being retailed without payment to them. Cable and satellite channels that air programmes from these companies pay them for the retransmission. Aereo has argued that the over-the-air signals of these companies are anyway free to catch and any normal antennae would bring them into the drawing room. Aereo is not a TV content provider, only an antenna provider, it claims. This is the crux of the discussion among the judges of the Supreme Court.

Kanojia was born in a well-to-do family and schooled in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. He left India in 1991 and graduated with a masters degree in computers from the Northeastern University there. The innovator has 14 patents in his name in fields from robotics to data communication. He formed his own company called Navic Networks, which collected data on advertisers and helped them target specific clientele. Navic was bought by Microsoft for $250 million in 2008. He started Aereo with $94 million in venture funds and within 18 months had perfected the receiver technology to deploy it in American cities.