NEW YORK — Aereo, the startup that offers live television broadcasts over the Internet starting at $8 a month, said it will start service in the Atlanta market on June 17, following an expansion to Boston on Wednesday.
Until this week, the service had been available only in the New York City area.
Aereo said Tuesday that it will offer 27 Atlanta-area broadcast channels, plus the Bloomberg TV cable channel. Service will be limited to residents of 55 counties in Georgia, Alabama and North Carolina. Those who had pre-registered will be able to start using Aereo on June 17. Others will be eligible a week later.
Aereo converts television signals into computer data and sends them over the Internet to subscribers’ computers and mobile devices. Subscribers can watch channels live or record them with an Internet-based digital video recorder. They can pause and rewind live television, just like using a DVR.
Aereo sells its service as a low-cost alternative to cable or satellite TV, and it plans to target those who have dropped pay-TV service or never had it. Aereo offers far fewer channels than most pay-TV packages, but it could appeal to viewers who already turn to Hulu, Netflix and other online sources for TV shows and movies.
Broadcasters see Aereo as a threat to their revenue, even though stations already make signals available for free. Broadcasters are increasingly supplementing advertising revenue with fees they get from cable and satellite TV companies for redistributing their stations to subscribers. If customers drop their pay-TV service and use Aereo instead, broadcasters lose some of that revenue.
The latest Aereo expansion came as ABC said it will offer live online feeds of local stations in some markets. The feeds are available for free starting Tuesday until June 30 to everyone in the New York and Philadelphia areas. After that, they will be limited to subscribers of certain cable services.
