As part of its last-ditch effort to be classified as a cable company, Aereo has filed documents with the US Copyright Office that has made public previously unknown details about the company.
At the end of 2013, Aereo had 77,596 subscribers in 10 cities, according to Peter Kafka of Re/code, who published the information earlier today. About 27,000 of them lived in New York City, Aereo's first market. Boston, its second market, had 12,000 subscribers, while Atlanta had 10,000.
By way of comparison, Kafka notes that Netflix has more than 50 million subscribers worldwide, while Hulu has 6 million subscribers for its premium service.
In October, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia told The Wall Street Journal that his company could have supported 350,000 subscribers in New York City. In the same interview, Kanojia emphasized that the company was shooting for breadth rather than depth.
"It's better for us to get 10,000 subscribers in 50 markets than 500,000 in New York City," he said.
Aereo customers paid between $8 and $12 per month, getting them Internet-streamed versions of local broadcast TV stations, as well as DVR capabilities. All of those subscribers were shut off after Aereo lost its Supreme Court case last month. Aereo argued that it was simply an equipment-rental service, leasing dime-sized antennas and DVR space to thousands of customers. But the high court found that it looked too much like a cable system to qualify for free re-broadcast.
Now, in a final effort, Aereo is attempting to pay the same copyright fees that cable systems have to pay in order to go legal. Those fees are low, at around 1 percent of total revenue.
However, the TV companies are sure to argue that Aereo shouldn't be treated to the same license as cable systems and that "public performance" rights to their copyrighted content are being infringed no matter what.
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