Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia said Tuesday at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia in New York that his company has seen its subscriber base grow times 10 in the last three to four months.
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Aereo CEO and founder Chet Kanojia. |
"We took the approach of saying that instead of building concentrated markets and spending a lot of money in marketing, what we are going to do is take a very wide-based deployment approach," Kanojia said, adding that Aereo will continue to focus on live broadcast and "let the library business belong to someone else."
Kanojia also said his company had originally planned to expand to 14 cities in 2013 but "as we got more confident we raised [the number of cities] to 22." Ahead of the conference, Aereo announced it would be launching in four new cities: Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio; Indianapolis, Ind.; and San Antonio, Texas. This will bring the total number of cities with Aereo access to 11.
Although Aereo has been reluctant to release the demographics of its subscribers, Kanojia told the audience that the service's customers are 65 to 70 percent male and have a median age range of 25 to 45, with most users in their late 20s and early 30s. He also disclosed that Aereo subscribers have a median income of $100,000 but attributed that to the high median incomes of the cities where the service has launched.
When asked about the lawsuits Aereo is facing, including the recent ruling in Aereo's favor by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Kanojia said he remains confident. "We are a technology company with ever-increasing margins as opposed to a content licensing company with ever-decreasing margins," he said. "Our confidence in the merits of our case is high. These opinions the courts have issued [in our favor] are not superficial opinions. They are very in-depth opinions."
He added, "I don't think ultimately anybody is going to be able to stop or dispute the idea of a consumer's antenna."
For more:
- check out the webcast (reg. req.)
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