CBS President On 'Illegal' Aereo: 'We Don't Think It's Catching On At All'

Considering how hard his company has been trying to obtain a legal death warrant for Aereo, CBS president Les Moonves affected a suspiciously nonchalant air when talking about the streaming TV service on Wednesday's earnings call.

"We think it's a lot more wind than reality," Moonves said, responding to an analyst's question about whether offerings like Aereo -- not that there are any comparable ones at the moment -- undermine the broadcast networks' ability to charge cable and satellite distributors hefty retransmission fees.

"It's an illegal service that's stealing our content," he added. "We don't think it's catching on at all."

Aereo hasn't publicly released any subscriber numbers that would challenge the latter assertion (and didn't immediately respond when I emailed them for a reaction to Moonves's words), but the former runs counter to the expressed opinions of federal courts that have considered the matter, most recently the Second Court of Appeals.

There's also a case to be made that the difficulty CBS is having negotiating a new carriage deal with Time Warner Cable owes something to the existence of Aereo. TWC has been instructing its New York City subscribers that they can use Aereo to watch CBS shows in the instance of a programming blackout. The two companies have a temporary agreement in place that expires at 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday.

Moonves had nicer things to say about other streaming services, in particular Amazon Prime. A deal whereby Amazon pays for the right to stream episodes to its customers four days after they air on CBS helped the network to turn a profit on the show, which costs $3 million an episode to produce, before a single episode ever aired. That, in turn, helped CBS to achieve its most profitable quarter ever, on $3.7 billion in revenues.

"I think you will see every network, and I know they are, develop and try to replicate the model we did," Moonves said.