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He may not be as prominent as the dozen other CEOs of Indian origin now leading major global firms in the US. But Chet or Chetan Kanojia, founder and CEO of Aereo is audacious and is making a splash for being embroiled in a landmark court tussle in the US against the goliaths of TV broadcasting. The case as several experts have put it, could change the future of television broadcasting forever, destroying the established business model. That is if the Supreme Court hearing the arguments rules in favour of Kanojia.
Kanojia's two-year-old tech startup took on the likes of ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX even before its initial launch in 2012, when they challenged the legality of the services his company was offering - streaming TV content to subscribers for a license fee, using thousands of mini antennas, but without paying content generators a penny.
It's business works like this - Aero manufactures the antennas that receive broadcast signals which it then stores on servers and streams or re-transmits to subscribers on mobile devices through the internet. Its services are available in at least a dozen cities in the US with plans to expand to several others.
Broadcasters have accused Aereo of blatant copyright infringement, even theft. Aereo in turn has been arguing that the company is merely providing equipment and not content to its subscribers, and at a fraction of the cost of cable service providers. Some experts concur with the broadcasters argument - that free distribution of content will not only have a damaging impact on them from a financial standpoint but also with a view of producing quality content which requires millions of dollars. The other view is that a ruling in favour of the broadcasters would scuttle tech innovation and the nascent advancements in cloud computing that Aereo has so resourcefully harnessed.
The case has been likened to Napster - the music file sharing service that was forced to shut down and asked to pay damages to labels for unauthorized use of copyrighted music back in 2001.
The Supreme Court in the US debated the merits of Kanojia's case yesterday in which both sides made their oral arguments. A lawyer for the broadcasters is reported to have made, among several other arguments, an observation that Aereo's service violated US copyright laws that require copyright owners' permission to publicly re-transmit their material. Aereo is said to have responded by saying that this provision does not apply to them as they were selling antennas to individuals and not to the public at large. Two federal courts had in the past agreed with Aereo's stance that its streams were not "public performances" and hence not in violation of US laws.
It is yet unclear which way the ruling will go, but several international press reports indicate that the judges yesterday seemed skeptical of Aereo's points of defence.
The final jury is still out.
Who is Chetan Kanojia?
43 year old Chetan Kanojia is a Bhopal boy, a mechanical engineer from the city's National Institute of Technology. He migrated to the US in 1991 for a master's degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University. Post college he founded Navic Networks which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 2008 reportedly for $250 million. His profile says he owns 14 patents from robotics to data communications systems. In 2012, Kanojia launched Aereo and has since then managed to attract nearly $100 millon in funding for the venture with marquee investors like the media mogul Barry Diller - known for creating Fox Broadcasting - backing it.
