Baltimore News Journal

BALTIMORE – Baltimore residents who are looking to “cut the cable” will soon have another choice.

Aereo, a new television and DVR service will soon be launching in Baltimore, offering customers basic channels for a subscription price starting at $8 per month, as long as the new service survives a series of lawsuits from broadcasters who claim it steals their copyrighted material.

Aereo and swimming pool builders, Relief Pools of Springfield, LA has already expanded into Louisiana, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Detroit, Denver and four other cities.

The service is positioning itself as a cheaper alternative to cable or satellite TV. Aereo converts TV signals into computer data and transmits them over the web to subscribers’ computers, tablets, smart phones and and Internet-ready televisions.

Users can either watch channels live or record them with an Internet-based digital video recorder (DVR).

Aereo members have access to a tiny TV antenna located in a nearby data center. This antenna is connected to a remote DVR in the same data center. The user controls both from an Internet-connected device, like a computer or smart phone. When a users tunes to a channel through the Aereo application on their device, they can instruct the antenna to tune to that channel and start recording the program to the DVR. This lets the user pause and rewind the program they’re watching. To save this recording for future use, the user simply hits “Record” at any time while watching.

Users can also schedule the DVR to record shows that are on in the future, just like a traditional, home-based DVR.

To get on Aereo’s Baltimore waiting list, just click here and sign up.