On February 19, 2014, in Community Television of Utah, LLC v. Aereo, Inc., the US District Court for the District of Utah granted the plaintiffs' motion for preliminary injunction, finding that Aereo's retransmissions of the plaintiff's programming are public performances. The court also granted Aereo's motion to stay the matter, but with the preliminary injunction in place, pending the Supreme Court's ruling in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc. (No. 2:13CV910DAK, (D. Utah Feb. 19, 2014)).

This decision is the first loss for Aereo in a series of cases focused on whether its service violates the public performance right. Aereo's service enables its customers to receive over-the-air broadcasts through the internet by providing them with access to small remote antennas. The service employs a one-to-one architecture where, when a user requests programming, an antenna is assigned to that user and the signal captured by the antenna is available only to that user. Aereo argues that each one-to-one transmission is not a public performance. Both the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and a Massachusetts district court have agreed, finding that Aereo's transmissions do not involve public performances, following the Second Circuit's earlier ruling in Cartoon Network, LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc. (Cablevision) (536 F.3d 121). However, in cases involving two other companies' similar technology, California and District of Columbia district courts found that the one-to-one transmissions remained public performances.

In granting the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, the court adopted the reasoning of the California and DC district courts and Judge Chin's dissent in Am. Broad. Co. v. Aereo, Inc., finding that the statute's plain language applies to any device or process that is used to transmit their copyrighted works to people outside Aereo's circle of family and social acquaintances (874 F. Supp.2d 373). The court also turned to the history of the Transmit Clause to support its interpretation. Specifically, the court noted that when Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1976, it added the Transmit Clause in response to two Supreme Court decisions under the 1909 Copyright Act that enabled cable systems to use community antennas to capture broadcast signals and retransmit them to connected homes without paying royalties (Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists Television, Inc., 392 U.S. 390 (1968), Teleprompter Corp. v. Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., 415 U.S. 394 (1974)). The Transmit Clause brings a cable television system's transmission of broadcast television programming within the scope of the public performance right. The court reasoned that Aereo's retransmissions are similar to those of a cable company and subject to the Transmit Clause.

The court also found this case distinguishable from Cablevision, because Cablevision involved a licensed stream delivered in a different way and the consumers (and Cablevision) had already paid for rights to the programming that was recorded on the remote DVRs.