Mobile

Aereo -- the Internet TV startup that major broadcasters accuse of illegally retransmitting their content -- announced Monday that it has decided to make its service available to 19 million people living in the New York City metropolitan region.

The company also kicked off its first advertising campaign, which shuns TV ads in favor of outdoor advertising including billboards and phone-kiosk posters. Aereo markets itself as an alternative to cable, satellite or telco TV, with the tagline "No Cable Required."

SILVER SPRING, Md. — Viewers may be able to start looking for key Discovery Communications programs on their tablet devices in the next few months, if CEO David Zaslav has anything to do with it.

Discovery has been one of the lone holdouts in the TV Everywhere space — no distributor anywhere in the U.S. has authentication rights to its programming — mainly because the programmer couldn’t agree on the value of the service or how it is measured. That, the Discovery CEO said, is about to change.

With mobile data traffic expected to grow 13-fold between 2012 and 2017, service providers will dramatically increase the amount of traffic they offload via Wi-Fi networks, from 33% to 46% of all data from smartphones and other mobile devices over that period, according to Cisco Systems’ latest forecast.

Mobile data traffic will reach 11.2 exabytes per month (134 exabytes annually) by 2017, a 66% compound annual growth rate over the period, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2012 to 2017.

The Weather Channel’s apps for smartphones and tablets have been downloaded more than 100 million times, and The Weather Co.’s revenue from non-TV sources is now “not far away” from being half of total revenue, according to digital division president Cameron Clayton.

Privately held Weather Co. does not disclose financial figures. The company is owned by Comcast’s NBCUniversal and private-equity firms Blackstone Group and Bain Capital.