Aereo's Chet Kanojia on Taking on TV's Big Broadcasters

A few years ago, I was traveling in India, and I remember standing outside in a village near Kolkata talking to some of my advisers. I thought it was the right time to create an online platform that allows consumers to have access to television online and have more choice in the marketplace. There was a growing imbalance in terms of value and price with the standard cable bundle. The logic of wanting seven or eight channels, but paying for 500, just doesn’t make any sense. Until now it’s survived because there haven’t been alternatives. I decided to create one.

I was born in India and came to the U.S. for graduate school. I pioneered how to collect viewership data from cable boxes at a very high scale, meaning millions of boxes in real time. I started Navic Networks in late 1999 and sold it to Microsoft in 2008. After you sell your company, you go through a depression. You were so engaged, so involved. You had people you worked with every day, and then they’re part of something else and nobody cares about you. When you go through that, a lot of anger builds up. One of my advisers said, “You really ought to wait two years to let that anger subside. If you start a new company in order to prove something again, you’re going to make mistakes.” It took me about a year and a half to get to that state where I was ready to chase an opportunity for its sake and nothing else.