I did find it a little odd that the "tour" that Aereo gave to TechCrunch[1] showed off a whole bunch of racks, servers, and transcoders but never actually showed the antenna arrays. They were supposedly inside the silver boxes (shown around the 2:00 mark), but why go through all that trouble to prove they have implemented thousands of little antennas and then not actually show them? And if your RF receivers were critical to operation, why are they located on metal racks in the middle of the rooftop unit enclosed in more metal?
I've been an Aereo beta tester for a while, so I'm actually pro-Aereo and hope there's a future for them. But my gut is really starting to wonder if the technology has all been a big put-on.
Aereo has played very fast and loose with the definition of "antenna".
In reality, it seems that they have a couple of good antennas in an area that record the shows, upload them, and then they stream them using the net.
You "local" antenna isn't really doing anything.