More than three years after Aereo Inc. rattled the broadcast television industry with its subscription service for streaming and storing live TV, the company's titanic copyright battle with the nation's major networks is finally over.

On Thursday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane in Manhattan approved a settlement in which Aereo will pay a combined $950,000 to CBS, ABC, Fox and other broadcasters to resolve a copyright suit that claimed at least $99 million in damages.

The settlement works out to less than 1 percent of what the broadcasters demanded—and it is surely dwarfed by their legal fees. But the broadcasters' ultimate aim was never to extract eye-popping damages from Aereo. It was to crush a legal and economic threat to their business model, and on that score they clearly won.