The antennas aren't "buried in a data center", they're housed in RF-transparent rooftop enclosures with line-of-sight (and reasonably close proximity) to the broadcast source.
Thanks for the clarification. Some other tech article I read last year didn't really clarify it, and the pics made it look like the antennas were basically on some form of a PCI card, installed in racked servers.
So then you're saying that two customers using Aereo watching the same broadcast channel are getting uniquely encoded signals, and one could theoretically be connected to an antenna that had poor reception/signal (for whatever reason) and the other could be connected to an antenna with a better signal, and they'd see visibly different image streams?
Yup. Our CEO gave a similar example (15:30) on C-SPAN a few days ago:
"If one individual consumer's antenna — let's say a mosquito sits on it or it fails because the associated electronics failed — your screen goes dark and your neighbor is fine".
"Neighbor" here meaning "the person using the antenna next to yours".
Side note: As a front-end engineer, I can tell you it's pretty cool to know that on the other end of your app there's an individual piece of tangible equipment interacting with the physical world. That's pretty unique.
It's so frustrating to watch that interview. He gives an initial summary of the situation and then the journalists ask him the same rephrased question over and over again.
So, looking at the TechCrunch video[1], are the antennae in the silver boxes seen at 2:30? I'm curious why we got to see the rest of the infrastructure but not these antennae other than their housings.
And if the box has 160 or so units per board, is all the 8VSB RF decode in there as well? The tour seems to imply that.
160 units capturing 18 mbit/sec (max) per 8VSB would be 2.88 gbit/sec going off to transcoding. But the module is using a 1 gigabit pipe? Or are all three ethernet cables attached to that module sending video?
Full disclosure: I work there.