IAC chairman Barry Diller would like to help. His Match dating unit is rolling out Crazy Blind Date, a mobile app that promises to provide just that: A fix-up with someone you’ve never met, and haven’t been able to see.

The basics: You tell the app (iOS and Android) when you want to go out, and where, and it finds someone with the same (basic) requirements. Both of you get a scrambled picture of each other, which should be enough to let know if your date has horns or tribal tattoos. But that’s about it.

Then you’re supposed to go meet up for 20 minutes.

Weird, right?

I can’t imagine a soul I know who would rely on a mobile app to fix them up on a blind date. But, then again, I don’t think I know many people who would go on a blind date, period. And I’m now so old that I’m frequently baffled by all sorts of digital social interactions — Snapchat let you do what? Why? Really? — and that makes me wary about handicapping any of this stuff.

Update: Thanks to Erin Griffith for pointing out that this isn’t a new concept: OKCupid, which IAC bought in 2011, tried this out, sans app, in 2007.

What’s really interesting about Crazy Blind Date, though, isn’t the overarching concept, but the reputation system it is trying out.

The app is free, and so is the matchmaking service. But once you’ve gone on a date, you’re encourage to rate your counterpart. And if you want to give them a thumbs-up — “kudos,” in the app’s parlance — you have to pay to do it, via an in-app purchase.

The ratings have nothing to do with whether you get a second date — the app will help you message your date after the fact, but the rest is up to you.

But those ratings will carry weight with the app’s algorithm, says Match CEO Sam Yagan. People who accumulate more kudos are more likely to get fixed up on future dates — as are people who pay for lots of kudos.

“Your value to the community is both the amount of money you make, and the amount of money you raise for other people,” he says.

The notion takes some explaining — I ended up going over it with Yagan several times — and I’m not sure how obvious it will be to Crazy Blind Date’s users. But it’s basically a “tip jar” approach, except that the tipper also gets credit.

And your approach to the incentive system may differ based on gender: Yagan imagines that men might spend money on women in hopes of impressing them (I keep thinking of dudes “making it rain” in strip clubs); women may spend money on guys they went out with because of pity/guilt.

We’ll see! The idea, beyond generating revenue for IAC, is to play around with commenting/rating systems we’ve become used to online, which are both helpful and notoriously unreliable.

So the notion of forcing people to put their money where their mouth is, or would like to be, is worth watching. Even if you’ve got a full social calendar.

That will change soon, Aereo says: The startup plans to roll out 22 more U.S. cities this year, starting in “late spring.”

That expansion will be funded by a $38 million B round that the company is also announcing. It’s an inside round, led again by Barry Diller’s IAC, along with previous investor Highland Capital Partners.

Other early backers, including FirstMark Capital and First Round Capital, are also back. The company has raised $63 million to date.

Aereo grabs over-the-air TV signals and routes them to users over the Internet, so they can watch broadcast TV whenever and wherever they want, via devices like PCs, iPads and Roku boxes.

It doesn’t pay for access to the broadcasters’ programming, but it is spending plenty of money on a court fight over that issue. It will also have to spend a chunk of change for each new city it opens in, both for marketing and to build out an array of tiny antennas it uses to pull down the TV signals.

Aereo’s expansion won’t change its operating plan, which means that it will only let users watch “in-market” TV. That is: If you live in New York City, you won’t be able to use Aereo to watch a Bears game airing on a Chicago station.

Speaking of which — here’s the Aereo expansion list, which includes Chicago and 21 other cities. Assuming, of course, that the courts don’t shut the company down before they get a chance to get going: Boston, Miami, Austin, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Tampa, Cleveland, Kansas City, Raleigh-Durham, Salt Lake City, Birmingham, Providence, and Madison, Wis.

And here’s a statement from Diller: “Free over the air television has been core to communications in the US since its beginning. Aereo is a superb technology allowing consumers to use the modern tools of the Internet to receive this, and other programming, with a great user interface and navigation that is easy and inexpensive. I continue to be excited by the possibilities and fully support its expansion.”

Today, the company is announcing its third funding round, totaling $30.3 million, with Expedia as the notable headline investor.

Others participating include Sutter Hill Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Concur Technologies and Felicis Ventures, as well as a number of travel industry vets, including Expedia’s founder Rich Barton, former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford and Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff.

The Mountain View, Calif., company first launched in 2010 as a way for travelers to see the actual view from a hotel room, but in late 2011, it rolled out hotel searching capabilities, which work like searches conducted on Kayak.com. Consumers visiting Room 77 can search across several travel sites, including Expedia, Booking.com and Orbitz, to compare prices.

The investment comes at a time when the travel industry is clearly heating up.

Over the past couple of months, Expedia acquired a 62 percent stake in a German travel site, Trivago, for $632 million; Liberty Interactive bought most of Barry Diller’s stake in TripAdvisor for $300 million; and Priceline acquired Kayak for $1.8 billion, shortly after the hotel-and-flight search site went public.

Room 77 allows U.S. consumers to book hotels all over the world, but the company plans to use the funding to expand globally, including to other English-speaking countries. To date it has raised $43.8 million.

In a release, Expedia’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, “We believe metasearch is an increasingly important model and complementary to our travel transaction businesses. The level of innovation and depth of content at Room 77 excites us about its future role in this important customer acquisition channel.”

Since Room 77 launched its hotel-search platform a year ago, it said its bookings and revenue have accelerated dramatically. Although it wouldn’t provide specific numbers, the company said that over the past nine months alone it has booked “hundreds of thousands of room nights,” which has resulted in significant month-over-month growth.

The company said it would also use the funding to expand its team of 25 employees, continue investing in product development and step up its marketing efforts.

We’re increasingly struck how advertising is dominated online by huge entities, and how compromising and time-consuming it could be for so few of us to try and lure big corporations to support us. We’re also mindful how online ads have created incentives for pageviews over quality content.

– “The Dish” blogger Andrew Sullivan, explaining why his new site will be supported (for now) entirely by reader subscriptions/contributions

TripAdvisor shares jumped in early trading Tuesday following the new, which is likely to spark speculation about Liberty’s intentions for the company.

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Or you can save yourself a lot of hassle and ask two guys who are already making pretty good progress.

That would be CollegeHumor’s Ricky Van Veen and Vice Media’s Shane Smith. And you can find them both at our Dive into Media conference next year.

To refresh your memory: Dive Into Media is our one-night-plus-one-day tour of the media landscape, and the way technology is changing that world day by day. That means unscripted, unrehearsed conversations with an all-star cast of moguls who hold very different perspectives. They’re all joining us Feb. 11 and 12 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, just south of Los Angeles.

Here’s who we’ve told you about so far: Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton, Hearst Magazines President David Carey, Google chief business officer Nikesh Arora, Facebook partnership vice president Dan Rose, HBO co-president Eric Kessler and Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino.

And here are two more — both of whom have done very well on the Web and are now trying to figure out how to apply those lessons to more traditional outlets:

Ricky Van Veen co-founded CollegeHumor in 1999, when he and his buddies were actually in college. Seven years later, the site had evolved from a frat-tastic side project into an ambitious, successful content creation machine, and Barry Diller bought it for his IAC conglomerate. Now Van Veen is still working for Diller, but he’s moved from the Web to older media: He’s making TV shows like “Chopped” via IAC’s Notional production company, and next year he’ll release “Coffee Town,” a full-length feature film.

Shane Smith and his Vice Media co-founders started out publishing a raucous, no-holds-barred magazine back in the ’90s, and fumbled their way into the Internet during the first Web boom. Now they seem to have it figured out: They’re on track to generate $200 million this year, while making eye-popping videos — here’s a tour guide for Kabul — backed by blue-chip advertisers like Intel. Next up: An HBO series, and lots of attention from guys who run really big media empires.

Just like our flagship D: All Things Digital conference, D: Dive into Media will give you rare access to deep, smart talks with the people who matter. And we’ll be announcing more of them in the weeks to come. For now, you can find registration information here.

That doesn’t seem like the end game: If they make a go of it, they’ll be the first digital-only tablet magazine to succeed. For a convincing argument against that happening, see Felix Salmon.

Which leads you inevitably to a place where Newsweek exists only as a subsection of The Daily Beast, Diller and Tina Brown’s free Web site.

That one does have audience. In September, it attracted five million unique visitors in the U.S., per comScore.* But it’s a modest audience by Web standards. Time Inc.’s Time.com, for instance, drew 9.7 million in September. AOL’s Huffington Post had 38.6 million.

And if you want to compare Daily Beast to another newish site that mixes reported news, aggregation and irresistible click-bait, try this one: Henry Blodget’s Business Insider attracted 7.6 million uniques last month.**

But Blodget’s site has about 100 employees. Newsweek has 270, for now. That can’t last.

*IAC, citing internal stats from Omniture, says it has 15 million unique visitors. But that number includes international visitors, and the wide gap between the publisher’s numbers and comScore’s are fairly standard.

** I still own some shares in Silicon Alley Media, Business Insider’s predecessor company.

CEO Chet Kanojia says his IAC-backed company will soon start offering programming that doesn’t come from local TV stations, which he’ll sell for an additional fee.

“We have done a few deals” with content owners, Kanojia said during an interview at a Goldman Sachs media conference this morning. “You’ll see us publicize those at some point soon.”

Kanojia didn’t offer much more detail. But asked if the deals he had struck were with “household name cable networks,” he answered: “Generally speaking, yes.”

So what does that mean? There’s no way Kanojia is working with any network affiliated with any of the four major broadcasters. They are suing his company for copyright violation, because it distributes their over-the-air programming without paying for it. So that rules out anything from News Corp. (which also owns this Web site), Disney, Comcast or CBS.

I would also be surprised if he has struck deals with any of the established cable programming giants who aren’t in the broadcast TV business, like Viacom or Discovery. Because it seems unlikely that Aereo would want to resell the all-or-nothing bundles the cable guys insist on.

More likely would be deals with programmers that don’t have full cable distribution in the U.S. I could imagine a theoretical deal with someone like Bloomberg TV, for instance, or Al Jazeera English. Asked to provide additional clarification, Aereo PR head Virginia Lam writes: “We have had conversations with a variety of content providers, including some cable networks.”

Kanojia also said his company would soon start streaming programming to PCs and laptops. Right now, users can only watch Aereo on Apple’s iPhones and iPads, and on their TV sets via Roku boxes and Apple TV. The company is also limited to the New York City area, but has already said it plans to expand to other cities.

So, here’s an attempt to change that: Barry Diller’s video site is rolling out a “tip jar” feature, which is exactly what it sounds like: Video makers will have the chance to ask for donations, payable via credit cards and PayPal, after their clips have run.

And next year, the IAC-owned site will offer a feature that takes the opposite strategy: Content owners will be able to put up a pay wall and charge viewers before they see the clips.

Vimeo will take a 15 percent cut of all the tip jar donations; it hasn’t figured out what its revenue split will be for pre-video payments. But it’s going to have to be no more than the now-standard 30 percent that Apple gets from its partners.

This isn’t revolutionary stuff, by any means — you can find tip jars and pay walls all over the Web. But it is part of Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor’s plan to build up the company’s revenue, which is primarily limited to subscription services it sells to pro-am video makers. Those customers make up a very small segment of the 75 million users that visit Vimeo each month.

How about ads? That works, to some degree, for nearly every other video site on the Web. But other than a few discrete banners, and one-offs like this awesome, interactive Old Spice thingy that ran last month, Vimeo doesn’t do ads — no pre-rolls, no mid-rolls, no overlays.

That’s nice for users, but it means that Trainor can’t do what YouTube, Hulu, et al, do, and share ad revenue with content makers. That might change one day: Trainor’s background is in advertising (at Yahoo, a digital magazine start-up, and AOL), and he says he’s open to ads if he can figure out how to make them work without wrecking the site. But it doesn’t seem to be a focus right now.

cheech color2 1280×720 from Vimeo Staff on Vimeo.

(Shutterstock/Robyn Mackenzie)

People familiar with the transaction say the Times now plans to sell About to Diller’s IAC conglomerate for about $300 million. The Times had previously planned to sell About to Answers for about $270 million.

Diller lobbed in his offer after AllThingsD broke the news of the pending Answers transaction.

Apparently, the fact that he’s offering a “clean cash” deal helped sway the Times and its Allen & Co. bankers. Answers and its private equity backers Summit Partners and TA Associates were going to finance the deal with debt, and would have included equity in Answers as part of the transaction.

No comment from the Times or IAC.

Update: And now, the press release(s)

IAC’s Ask.com Acquires The About Group from the New York Times Company

NEW YORK, August 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Today IAC (Nasdaq: IACI) announced that Ask.com has agreed to acquire 100% of The About Group from The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) for $300 million in cash.

“The About.com acquisition is completely in line with IAC’s M&A strategy of acquiring, at disciplined valuations, companies that are complementary and synergistic with both our existing businesses and our areas of expertise,” said Greg Blatt, CEO of IAC. “We are extremely excited to bring these two businesses together; About.com’s content will differentiate and greatly increase the authority of Ask.com’s offerings, while Ask’s expertise in search technology and user experience will improve the discoverability of existing content on About.com. The complementary nature of these two businesses will provide significant synergies going forward, and thus we expect that About.com will generate more profit as a part of Ask.com and IAC than it has been able to over the last few years.”

With nearly 1,000 topic sites and more than three million unique articles, About.com is one of the most comprehensive content and reference libraries on the Internet, offering expert, quality content across 90,000 topics that helps users find solutions to a wide range of daily needs. Globally, nearly 100 million unique users visit About.com on a monthly basis. Ask.com, with more than 100 million users globally of its own, is one of the leading search and Q&A platforms on the internet.

“This is a rare merger with true bilateral synergies,” said Joey Levin, CEO of IAC Search & Applications. “On the one hand, the Ask.com search and content business has generated exceptional revenue and profit growth by marketing and distributing a quality consumer search and Q&A experience, and About provides Ask with a tremendous amount of quality content to further enhance that experience and the credibility of the Ask brand. On the other hand, About.com has created, and today continues to grow, a library of content which consumers love across a vast array of categories, and we can now market and distribute that content and the About brand through Ask and significantly increase traffic and profitability at About.”

Upon closing, The About Group will join IAC’s Search and Applications reporting segment, joining Ask.com, Dictionary.com, Mindspark, nRelate, and Pronto. Darline Jean, About’s CEO, will report to Doug Leeds, Ask.com CEO. This segment has recorded double digit growth for the last two years, consistently outperforming expectations and driving the company’s total revenue and profits. The deal was signed on Sunday August 26, 2012.

The New York Times Company Agrees to Sell Its About Group to IAC
NEW YORK, August 26, 2012 – The New York Times Company (NYSE: NYT) has entered into an agreement to sell its About Group, which includes the Web sites of About.com, ConsumerSearch.com and CalorieCount.com, to IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) for $300 million in cash.
The all cash transaction is expected to close in the next several weeks. The Company intends to use the net proceeds for general corporate purposes.
“About.com has been a strong contributor to our company since its acquisition in 2005,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman, The New York Times Company. “About’s early expertise in search engine optimization, expert content and revenues from cost-per-click and display advertising made it a valuable component of our portfolio for the past seven years. This sale will allow the Times Company to focus on the development and growth of our core brands locally, nationally and on a global scale.”

But just in case, Barry Diller would like the Times to know he’s interested, too.

As Reuters reported earlier today, Diller’s IAC has put in its own bid for About. I don’t know the exact amount Diller says he’s willing to pay, but sources familiar with his offer say it is above $300 million and “substantially more” than $270 million.

And Diller may not be the only one willing to bid for About.

For starters, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Demand Media make an offer. Sources familiar with the companies say both IAC and Demand had signaled their interest in About earlier this year, but that the publisher “went dark” this spring, presumably because it was lining up its Answers deal.

The question is whether Diller and/or anyone else will ever have a chance to negotiate with the Times. As I reported earlier this month, Answers and its private equity backers have signed a letter of intent to buy About. That means Answers has some window of exclusivity to get the deal done, and the Times can’t shop it around until that expires.

Presumably, the Times could try to find some way to extract itself from that deal if it thought it could make a lot more money on About. But that would be messy. And my gut is that unless someone makes a truly outsized offer for the property, the Times would just as soon get About off its books quickly — a move Wall Street has already endorsed.

You can see the new grid at the bottom of the post. By far the most important things here are the free hour-a-day option, and the one-dollar, one-day pass. Both are obviously great ways to get consumers to sample the new service, and the free option doesn’t require a credit card account to sign up, which removes a big hurdle.

But the dollar option could also end up being the way that lots of people use the service, especially while its programming choices remain constrained to the broadcast TV channels. It may not be worth $8 or $12 a month to you to be able to watch CBS on your laptop or iPad. But there could be lots of one-off events that make it well worth a buck to get those channels on the go: Think Oscars, or election coverage, or football Sundays this fall.

The bigger picture is that Aereo has the ability to do any kind of pricing scheme it wants, because it’s not constrained by any licensing agreements, and doesn’t share any revenue with anyone. Spotify or Hulu or anyone else would love to do this kind of thing, but they can’t without arduous/impossible negotiations with copyright owners/investors.

At some point, some of that footloose feeling will go away — if Aereo builds out its bundle by adding, say, the likes of Netflix, it will have to figure out a different version of the pricing grid. But, for now, it’s a big advantage, as the company looks to expand outside of a few thousand early adopters in New York City.

[Click image to enlarge]

*To be clear: Diller doesn’t own Aereo; his IAC is an investor.

And now, because there’s a mini-debate about exactly what Diller said, here’s my transcript of his comments:

… The brand is good. What is the problem? The problem is, manufacturing and producing a weekly newsmagazine, and that has to be solved. And everybody is going to face the same problem — other than, I think, luxury brands — over a period of time. Because advertising in this category is entirely elective. And the transition will happen, I believe. I’m not saying it will happen totally. But the transition to online from hard print will take place. We’re examining all of our options. Our plan is that, by September, October and certainly, uh, firmly have a plan in place for next year. It’s going be different than it is this year. I can’t tell you in what ways it’s going to be different. But it will be different.

For what it’s worth, I ran my interpretation of Diller’s soliloquy — that he’s thinking about going Web-only with Newsweek, but hasn’t committed to it — by IAC rep Justine Sacco. She’s going with that version, too.

That’s all old news now: All the big media companies that took hits yesterday — Comcast, Viacom, Disney, etc. — are trading back where they were on Wednesday, before Barry Diller and his Web video start-up won a legal victory.

So which group got it right? The sky-is-kinda-falling folks who sold media stocks yesterday morning? Or the “What, me worry?” camp that bought them up yesterday afternoon and today?

Insert professional shrug here. The big-TV versus Aereo case is just starting — this week’s ruling was simply a decision not to shut the company down while the trial moves on — and is likely to drag on for years.

Investors don’t like uncertainity, but they’re kind of okay with uncertainity that won’t affect the near-term future. So that’s probably the best explanation for keeping things status quo, share-price-wise.

But just for giggles, let’s pretend that Aereo ends up definitively winning its legal argument: That it can sell access to broadcast-TV programming without paying broadcasters.

What then? Here’s how it might break down for different parts of the Big TV Industrial Complex:

Broadcasters: These guys have the most to lose. In recent years, big over-the-air broadcasters have been able to secure big “retransmission” fees from the cable companies for their stuff — CBS, for instance, has said it should pocket $250 million in retrans fees this year, and that it could end up pocketing as much as $700 million a year a few years from now.

And if Aereo doesn’t need to pay broadcasters to show that stuff, then maybe pay-TV providers like Time Warner Cable and Verizon don’t have to, either. Broadcasters still make most of their money from selling ads, and that business doesn’t have to disappear if viewers head to Aereo or other “over the top” alternatives.

But just like the fees that Netflix and other digital outlets have started paying Big Media companies, retrans fees are extra valuable to the broadcasters because they’re almost 100 percent pure profit.

Cable programmers: Their core business doesn’t get affected, because there’s no way for Aereo to get its hands on stuff like ESPN or Bravo without paying for it.

There is a possibility that Aereo’s customers are happy to just get programming from the four big broadcast networks, and add in a few shows here and there from iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, etc. And if that happens, that’s not good for cable programmers, since it could accelerate cord-cutting.

But it’s just as likely that Aereo ends up striking deals with the cable networks, so it can sell its customers a more complete package, becoming a virtual pay-TV provider itself. And the cable guys would be just fine with that — as long as Aereo agrees to buy bundles.

Pay-TV providers: The negative scenario is one where Aereo attracts lots of subscribers for a broadcast-only package of programming, and many of those customers stop paying the likes of Comcast and Verizon for TV.

But even if that happens, they’ll still end up paying the likes of Comcast and Verizon for broadband. And that’s not a terrible scenario for those guys at all, since broadband margins are much better than video-service margins. And again, if Aereo doesn’t have to pay for broadcast TV, then the pay-TV guys could make the same argument themselves — which is what Time Warner Cable boss Glenn Britt has already been publicly musing about.

Now, let’s make it even more complex: All of the big media companies are in multiple lines of business, which makes it even harder to assess their impact.

Three of the Big Four broadcasters, for instance, are owned by companies with big cable programming businesses, which reduces the hit they might take (it may also give them the option to move some programming from broadcast channels to cable channels, as Disney did when it moved “Monday Night Football” from ABC to ESPN).

And Comcast is a broadcaster, a cable programmer and a cable provider. What does Aereo mean for it?

So it’s easy to see why Barry Diller is betting on Aereo: If it works, it could change the way money flows in the TV business, and he could be in a position to pocket some of the flow himself.

But that doesn’t mean Aereo will fundamentally disrupt the TV business. Or at least that’s what Wall Street seems to think today.

U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan denied the request for a preliminary junction despite finding that Aereo threatens the broadcasters “with irreparable harm,” including by luring away cable subscribers, that she said was “substantial but not overwhelming.”

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Trainor replaces Dae Mellencamp, who has been running the site since 2009. Vimeo says she’ll stay on as president.

This is an interesting time for Vimeo, which started as a side project for the College Humor crew way back in 2004, and migrated to IAC when Barry Diller bought the comedy site. Since then, Vimeo has occupied a weird space in IAC’s portfolio. It’s a small player in a booming industry — not big enough to attract much of Diller’s time or resources, but perpetually promising enough not to kill off.

To its credit, Vimeo has never tried to compete directly with YouTube. It has a tiny fraction of Google’s audience — it claims 70 million uniques, compared to YouTube’s 800 million-plus — and has only grudgingly pursued advertising.

Instead it has tried to stake out a niche as a high-end video site for a sliver of people who care about video quality, and offers a premium version for users who want more features, etc. But that’s not a huge business, either, and I’d be shocked if the company was making money.

So what now? I wouldn’t be surprised to see Vimeo explore a more aggressive approach to ads, given Trainor’s background — he was a well-regarded ad guy at Yahoo, and FlipGloss, the start-up he co-founded, was an attempt to create “magazine-style” advertising for Web sites.

Last month, PandoDaily reported that IAC was trying to “sell” Vimeo; when I asked Diller about that, he said Vimeo is not for sale, and that the story had exaggerated his interest in creating a separate corporate struture for Vimeo, like Condé Nast has done with Reddit.

Regardless, if Diller wants to be in a position to do anything with Vimeo, the company will eventually need to start generating some real revenue. Landing Trainor is a sign he’s getting more serious about that.

And now, if you live in New York City, you can pay Aereo to send it to your laptop or phone for $12 a month.

Aereo debuted today with a press conference, where reporters had lots of questions about the mechanics of the service (which are really interesting, and involve an array of thousands of dime-sized antennas, per the images below) and its legality (also interesting, and also dependent on the idea of each antenna “belonging” to an individual subscriber).

But the core question is why someone would use the service: Assuming it works as advertised, would you use it to supplement your existing TV service, or use it to replace some of the TV you’re already paying for?

The former, for now. And maybe, down the road, you could do the latter.

Today, Aereo makes the most sense as an add-on for TV super-consumers — the ones who have digital cable and HBO and Netflix and Apple TV and want to watch even more stuff on more screens.

Since it’s only delivering broadcast TV, Aereo won’t let you get lots of shows you like. But it will let you get a lot of shows you do like, and it will let you access them in new ways.

For instance: For various odd reasons, the broadcasters haven’t been able to figure out how to serve those people live TV on the go, to their iPads and iPhones, and Aereo will do that.

But Aereo’s ambition is much bigger. IAC CEO Barry Diller, who led a $20 million funding round, says Aereo will eventually be a “wedge” that will force the TV industry to give up the bundle: The idea is that eventually you’ll start by paying Aereo $12 a month for a bunch of TV, and add a series of channels and programs that you like on top of that. In theory, you’ll still end up paying much less than you do now.

CEO Chet Kanojia is slightly more diplomatic: “It’s going to start the process of putting the thought in people’s mind that says ‘I have other options.’”

Alternate scenario: If Aereo isn’t shut down by a legal challenge, it will act as a loud starting gun in the ear of cable TV providers and broadcast networks, prompting them to get their act together.

There’s no reason that, say, a Comcast cable subscriber shouldn’t be able to watch NBC or any other channel they get on their TV, live, on the go, on their iPad. And if Aereo finally convinces the cable and TV guys to make that happen, that will be good for consumers. But maybe not so good for Aereo.

But if you bet against the cable and TV guys getting their act together, you might get very good odds.

Kanojia sat down with me after his press conference to explain what he’s up to. He’s soft-spoken and the IAC lobby was loud, so you may have to turn this up a bit.