I have an non-rented version of Aereo right now in my house.
I own a TV Antenna in my attic, and a HDHomeRun box that sits in my wiring closet. The TV antenna goes to the HDHomeRun, which then converts the microwatt signal coming out of the antenna a few time, first separating out the channel i want to watch, then digitizing that signal, then streams it over TCP/IP to my HTPC, which then saves it to a HDD for later playback.
If I move it across town and access it via a VPN does it suddenly make it illegal?
The antenna array is exactly what makes it a 1-1, non-public performance of the data. The data I store on my DVR is a unique copy of the data vs the data stored on my neighbor's DVR with the exact same setup. Theoretically, because it's a digital signal once it's decoded the data may look exactly the same, but the data path was unique. If they used one antenna and only encoded each channel once, then they'd be in violation. That's what the Cable channels do now: 1-many performance, which is why they pay retransmission fees.