Charlie should keep the Slingbox alive and not kill it off as planned. Not everyone has OTA reception. Some family who are Dish subs have had to go through the rare loss of an OTA and my Slingbox allowed them to continue viewing it during the blackout. It kept them from cancelling Dish and getting cable.
FWIW, Aereo truly was perfectly legal. Every Court found that it passed the tests. It was SCOTUS who just didn't like the idea of it existing. It was such a bad ruling that SCOTUS had to publish all manner of qualifications and notices to ignore or NOT apply their ruling to similar technologies and other place-shifting devices and services. They had to scream through the confusion that the Aereo ruling should apply to the Aereo case ONLY! Huh, it can't be considered a real precedent that judges can apply? It was an very long over-reach of SCOTUS, and the often wrong Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was correct in his dislike of the service, but admitted it had found what we call a loophole in the law that did not require payments to the local broadcasters, but that it is up to Congress to close the loophole, not the Courts, and this why every other lower court ruled in Aereo's favor. Keep in mind that the subscribers to Aereo remotely controled the tiny antennas to even go into a position that prevented the antennas from receiving any signal when a subscriber was not viewing their local OTA channel. Under the Scotus ruling, Slingbox is illegal--which of course it is not--and Dish DVR's with Sling such as the H3 are illiegal--which it is not--Cable Cos. cloud DVR services on their servers that meet all requirements to be legal would also be illegal under the SCOTUS Aereo ruling--but of course the Cable Cos. are not violating the law--TiVo's own streaming features of local OTA channels to remote locations and devices would also be illegal--which it is not. OK enough. Just a final thought below:
Congress should just allow the broadcasters to offer their OTA channels to each individual MVPD account (the consumer household) for ANY price it wants, that way they continue to get paid for their content while those who don't want to pay don't get the channel. Of course, the broadcasters/NAB have fought just such a proposal to death a few years ago, but I think it is the ONLY rational solution. Even the MVPD's said they would handle the billing and pass the money on to the broadcasters. Too easy, huh? NAB is in great fear of such an arrangement because far too many people would likely NOT pay a penny for their local OTA's and the broadcasters would likely end up NOT CHARGING ONE CENT for access to their OTA channels because they would need every eyeball they can get when they have to rely ONLY on advertising for their revenue--as it should be and always was. After all, don't we, every citizen of the U.S. OWN the frequencies on which those huge companies make their money, but in return we get "free of charge" programming with commercials that are necessary to pay for the programming. The OTA channels belong to US, and yet they have the nerve to CHARGE US to watch our OTA channels, even AFTER they make all the money on advertising. That's NAB.