Chet Kanojia [Resources]

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.