Sorry, I'm still confused what you mean by "be prepared before it happened". Are you saying they should have pursued a different strategy/loophole around copyright law? That they should have realized they had no chance and not pursued funding? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just genuinely don't understand what preparation you're saying they should have taken.

For the record, I work at a company with a lot of former Navic Networks employees (the company Chet Kanjoia founded before Aereo) so there's plenty of talk about Aereo and I'm pretty familiar with their model.