Aereo confirmed Thursday that it has partially reopened the door to new customers in New York City about a week after it temporarily stopped adding new subscribers in the market because it had run out of capacity.
Aereo is sending invites to customers who have signed up on the company's wait list, spokeswoman Virginia Lam said via email, confirming a Bloomberg report. “We have not opened up the website yet to general sign ups, as we want to give those on the wait list priority,” he added, but declined to say how many people were on that wait list.
The partial re-opening comes just as the Sochi Games, to be covered extensively by NBC, get underway.
Citing a similar capacity crunch, Aereo stopped accepting new subscribers in Atlanta earlier this week. Aereo didn’t say when it expects to allow wait-listed customers in Atlanta to sign up for the company’s broadband TV/cloud DVR service, which starts at $8 per month.
Aereo has not specified the nature of its capacity issues in New York City and Atlanta, but recent events have begun to raise questions about the scalability of Aereo's platform, which relies on encoders, servers and an array of thumb-sized digital antennas that capture over-the-air TV signals.
