Chet Kanojia [Resources

Abstract

Few start-up founders dream of going to court. But Chet Kanojia had a feeling that's where he was headed. When it came time to launch his TV streaming service Aereo, Kanojia says he and his New York City-based team spent about six months explaining the technology to media executives. They'd hoped to find broadcast industry partners. But, he says, "the industry doesn't work that way. The industry first litigates, then tries to go to Congress, and then when all fails, then they actually do business." So he wasn't surprised when, within a month of Aereo's February 2012 debut in New York City, a consortium that included major U.S. broadcasters such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox filed suit, alleging that Aereo was redistributing copyrighted material. . Kanojia might be more inclined to take on large, multibillion-dollar media conglomerates than most. He's seen firsthand how fast changes in media consumption can happen. It was only in the mid-1980s, when he was a teenager living in Bhopal, India, that his family got a color TV, which picked up just a few hours of programming per day. But by the early '90s, they were watching cable television. . Bhopal is perhaps best known for the Union Carbide disaster there in 1984: Kanojia was pulled out of school to help swap out oxygen tanks for those poisoned by gas. After earning a bachelor's in mechanical engineering nearby at the National Institute of Technology, he completed a master's in computer systems engineering at Boston's Northeastern University. Eager to join the business world, he abandoned his Ph.D. program to join a small product development firm in Massachusetts, before going on to found his first company, Navic Networks, in 2000. . Navic, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008, aimed to help cable television companies make the most of the data their set-top boxes collected for purposes such as spectrum planning and targeted advertising. It provided the seed of inspiration for Aereo.