There's no dispute that the Supreme Court's decision Wednesday in the Aereo case puts the fledgling TV-over-the-Internet startup out to pasture.

But the outcome goes well beyond Aereo and its paying subscribers' abilities to stream broadcast television without the broadcasters' consent. Instead, the 6-3 decision (PDF) siding with broadcasters presents an even more important question involving cloud computing and its future.

There was a lot of chatter ahead of Wednesday's decision that a loss for Aereo would also upend the cloud, which is expected to become a $1.1 trillion industry by next year. If Aereo were to be blocked from allowing consumers the ability to stream their content at will, what would prevent rights holders from making the same claim against cloud storage providers?

The answer to that question depends on who you ask.

Even the three-justice minority, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, said that the cloud is perhaps in jeopardy and at the whims of rights holders. "The Court vows that its ruling will not affect cloud-storage providers," Scalia wrote. He added that the majority "cannot deliver on that promise given the imprecision of its results-driven rule."

The majority opinion, from Justice Stephen Breyer, said that Aereo amounted to a cable television provider and that Congress has emphatically required that providers pay broadcasters to transmit their content. End of story. Questions involving cloud computing and "other novel issues not before the Court," Breyer wrote, "should await a case in which they are squarely presented."

Aereo transmits over-the-air broadcast television using dime-sized antennas to paying consumers, who can watch TV online or record it for later viewing. Broadcasters like ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, and others haven't given Aereo permission to do that, so they sued.

In a growing number of markets nationwide, Aereo customers rent up to two of the tiny antennas, which are housed in Aereo facilities across the country. The antennas capture local, over-the-air broadcasts and funnel them to local customers in real time. The content is freed to stream to almost any Internet-connected device. Another antenna syncs with a DVR for later viewing for about $12 monthly. Broadcasters decried the system as "technological gimmickry" to skirt copyright and other retransmission laws.

Call Aereo whatever you want, but the process seems a lot like cloud computing. All of which leads to the question of whether a license is needed to stream copyrighted content from Dropbox, for example?

The court's majority doesn't go there, and it instead focuses on Aereo acting like a cable TV service and hence being treated like one. The broadcasters have claimed all along that the case has nothing to do with cloud computing.

"There is an obvious difference between a service that merely stores and provides an individual user access to copies of copyrighted content that the user already has legally obtained, and a service that offers the copyrighted content itself to the public at large," they said.

Others disagree. The Electronic Frontier Foundation published a headline Wednesday that reads, in part, that the high court's ruling "fails to protect Internet streaming."

David Sohn, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the "decision doesn't directly undermine cloud computing." But, he said, "it leaves open significant questions about the legal foundations of cloud-based services. The full impact of today’s decision will take time, and possibly additional litigation, to sort out."

On the flip side, Thomas Goldstein, the operator of Scotusblog that has argued about two dozen cases before the high court, said the majority issued a "clearly crafted" opinion "to not be the death knell of cloud computing." Regarding the Scalia dissent, he said, "It's one of those that, at the end of the day, doesn't have a whole lot of impact on future cases."

Seth Davidson, a Washington, DC, intellectual property attorney, agrees with Goldstein, saying the decision was "written in mind with preserving those types of technologies as it was with striking down Aereo."

Others, like Mark Cooper, a director at the Consumer Federation of America, suggested that the decision won't be the last word on the topic. "For copyright holders who have little else to cling to," he said, "it is red meat."