Like a lot of tech folks, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aereo in the wake of a Supreme Court case that found the service violates copyright.

Publicly, Aereo has made it very clear it plans to continue to fight, urging users to contact Congress to tweak copyright law in their favor and repeatedly making it clear that the current service is being “paused,” not shut down forever. (Aereo’s employees, meanwhile, “are working as usual — no changes,” a spokesperson said this week.)

But the historical comparisons don’t paint a pretty picture, and Joan E. Solsman has a good piece interviewing Napster and Grokster veterans about their respective fates after various courts’ copyright smackdowns:

Mike Weiss, the chief executive of Morpheus-owner Streamcast from 2000 through seven years of legal travails, said the tough prospect of tech innovators disrupting incumbents only gets tougher when the innovator is a small company. Though he didn’t surrender for years, there is an inescapable reality of paying for the fight, he said. “Don’t give up, Chet, but get some deep pockets. You’re going to need them,” he said. In the case of Napster, ongoing legal faceoffs handicapped the service before it could fulfill its promise, he said. Dodge noted that everything the company did had to be measured against legal implication rather than what would be the best experience for the user. Don Dodge, the vice president of Napster product development in 2000, suggested that a better approach for Aereo would be to return with a more limited service, something that works within the boundaries of the legal opinion and flies under the radar, rather than “appeal, raise more money, and charge the castle again.” The fight also entrenched the record companies in an oppositional stance. Even with the backing of German entertainment giant Bertelsmann, the owner of the BMG music label that had sued Napster, Dodge said Napster’s efforts to be copyright-legal never seemed to satisfy the labels and the courts. “It became clear to me, this is not a winnable fight,” he said.

The whole piece is a really great look back at some landmark cases with companies that would reshape industries — with the common theme being that the revolutionary companies wouldn’t (in any true version of their original selves) get to be there on the other side.

One thing it doesn’t touch on is the technical hurdles that will be involved. If Aereo does come back with licensing deals, the micro-antenna technology largely becomes moot at best (why bother with thousands of copies if you have the right to cheaply digital copy just one as needed?) and a major expense at worst (already, there were concerns about the power draw of Aereo’s antenna arrays, which might have been an acceptable trade off when not paying for content).

And once those arrays are ditched (the technology itself could be a tempting spin-out acquisition target by a mobile device maker), Aereo is still left to rework much of its core infrastructure. That means everything from its user experience (no need to pick and choose which shows to “record” if they’re all licensed) to the way it caches and streams video — pitting it against others who have been building both content relationships and appropriate technical infrastructure for years, such as Cambridge’s own Philo.

Aereo has deep pockets — it’s raised a little under $100 million — and what looks like a good team and a once-dedicated user base (how big that base had been is a closely held secret). But it also never hit the mass appeal as the Napster or Grokster (charging money has that effect). Streaming television almost certainly seems like the promised land right on the horizon, but all the indications are that Aereo won’t be the one to lead us there.

Who knows though: Miracles do happen.