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circletimessquare writes "Ken Schaffer, who made his name inventing a wireless microphone and a satellite telephone service, has a new offering called TV2Me. It's basically MPEG-4, improved upon, that allows for what he calls 'best of class' streaming video over a normal broadband connection. Right now, his only clients are rich sports fanatics, but he eventually wants to make his technology as ubiquitous and as essential as TiVo is to some."
Finally, some fair and balanced news.
i wonder how long before this becomes icravetv part deux
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Didn't a guy get sued a while back for providing a VCR like function over the internet. The best reference I could find was from geek.com anyone with more info on how this one wont get sued.
Our favorite geek writer covered this in a nice piece about a month ago.
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Hollywood isn't going to stand for this.
It's the reason why we have region-encoding on DVDs, DirecTV can only give the NYC and LA "locals" to people in the boonies, and ICraveTV didn't fly. The NFL and DirecTV make millions off of their Sunday Ticket package which is based on selling for hundreds of dollars a season the right to recieve games freely broadcasted in other parts of the USA.
Copyright owners are declaring boundries across which their content cannot move freely, and they're going to crush any technology that threatens to make it easy to break those lines.
$6500! Don't think I'll be getting one any time soon...
Phil
Cringely had an article about this a few months back http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028. html/.
He gives a good overview of the tech and why it is so cool.
Isn't that called a TV? Need ultraportable? Get a Watchman or Casio.
Thats a bit pricey IMO.
You could buy a copy of win2k3 and enable streaming video + a $30 ati wonder card and do the same thing....
Then there's still the sticky matter of not being allowed to watch a network station from outside the area your local affiliate owns.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why does this irk me so? Not that I'd actually spend 6500 bucks on this *anyway*...
Or at least anything supporting the nullsoft video codec playback. I paypal my $5 a month and get access to pr0n, Family Guy, Penn/Teller, Simpsons, I. Zim, and others where ever I want whenever I want. What's the deal?
Really now. Is there any thing on broadcast that is worth recording. I subscribe to Dish Network. It much cheaper than cable and provides very good pictures on my set. You can get a recorder for a little extra. The market is not there/here.
That last one would mean I'd have to avert my eyes from Slashdot, however briefly. I can't see that happening anytime soon.
sigs, as if you care.
...he eventually wants to make his technology as ubiquitous and as essential as TiVo is to some."
"Dude, check out my new TV2Me."
"We got our TV2Me bill."
"I was watching TV2Me while waiting in the traffic jam."
The name doesn't really work too well.
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2B1ASK1
This only serves to watch your local programming while being elsewhere. What I want is to be able to get TV from any country in the world (well, in reality where they broadcast in English, Spanish, or French).
Is it possible to just VPN into your computer at home that's hooked up to a TV tuner instead of using TV2Me?
It is legal to record a TV show, and watch it later somewhere else right. Well I guess you could think of Tv2Me as a really fast runner that is constantly recording a zmall bit of the show and running across the continent to you. I'm sure companies will say it infringes on their copyrights and sue the company or the users. I don't see it being a huge threat to media companies. This is an expensive piece of hardware, and you need a lot of upstream bandwidth. Not many people are going to be able to use this.
"brxref
A high-def mpeg2 stream requires about 20mbps ... anyone know how much a similar quality mpeg4 stream takes?
It's about receiving it and making it available to you wherever you are. ie..
However, I'm certain our legislators will rush to the rescue and erect borders, boundaries, tariffs, injunctions, and so on as needed to ensure terrorists don't somehow benefit. Imagine(!) being able to watch Al Jazeera in the confort of your living room, without all the helpful filtering of the government and big media empires. Shocking...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Notice the first link in the article write-up. I think that's why the moderators found this redundant.
This is cool. It's a bit like a fax in that instead of sending the electronic document directly from A to B, you're putting it through this extra step, in this case reception at home then retransmission.
The cool thing is not the technology. The cool thing is it challenges the media industry to get their act together with giving consumers more choices for how to consume their media.
Oh, I see. Sorry, moderators, you're on the right drugs. The story submitter is on the wrong ones. I never thought to check a link to his name as if it would go to something other than a biography of some sort. Guess the submitter wanted to be artistic instead of making sense. My bad...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm not all that familiar with them, but I have heard about people getting all kinds of cool stuff with a real satelite dish. I have heard of getting behind the scenes stuff from live events when the edditing is done remotely. Seems $6500 would be in the same ball park. TV2Me would be bettter for a traveling person, but come on. Do you really need to watch that jets game in London?
"brxref
No, they are not different thresholds. And yes. the site has gone dramatically down hill in terms of it's negativity..
I've been able to get broadcast TV anywhere ever since I could remember. Are you guys living in Alaska or something?
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
As to assigning an IP address to a DVR Box, Sony is promoting it's Location Free TV as being able to stream your TV shows to anyplace on the internet.g /index.shtml?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=100 01&categoryId=47640
http://www.sonystyle.ca/view/LocationFreeTVLandin
Maybe because it's only being offered in Canada right now they're getting around the MPAA - but what is there to keep someone from setting this up in Canada and running it and accessing from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the Excited States?
The system can be bought at Best Buy (www.bestbuy.ca) in Canada for about $1800 (Cdn) or from Sonystyle.ca directly. It's basically a Small TV set tablet with a 802.11 link to a base station that streams the video to the tablet and even lets you serf the net with a little browser.
Sorry - don't know what operating system they're using - it looks like a custom UNIX setup.
Although his system consists of both the encoding/netcasting/streaming and the client piece of it... the end benefit might not be that everyone zings their cable from home to their office PC (wait a minute, THAT would be pretty cool).
The technology/concept is the cool part regardless of price at this early proof of concept stage. A different implementation could be some sort of uber VOD (video on demand) system, like those old QWEST commercials.
You could get *every* channel (hypothetically), and kinda do for TV/Cable/satellite what VOIP does for long distance.
What's really the outstanding question for me is, how much upload bandwith do you need to send/server the video? Will "home" broadband connections capped at 128k up be able to do it, or is this SDSL territory?
e.
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Snapstream's Beyond TV server is kind of like this. You can log on anywhere with an interenet connection and view live streams from your home PC's tv-tuner card. It will only stream mpeg2, but you can also access recorded shows (can encode in divx or whatever you want). The quality might not be as high, but it looks like a cheap alternative. There are other options for streaming Live TV from your home pc that I've been playing around with, but with Snapstream, you can change channels much easier from remote locations. It's not exactly the same, but you can get your local cable from remote locations. $100 vs. $6500??
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This "TV2Me" device is just a standard SFF PC with a TV tuner (http://spaceshift.net/images/pvs.jpg). And yet he charges 6500$ US for this.
Is it just me, or could I put together a box with all the same hardware for under 500$ US?
The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net. Is that feature really worth $6000 US? I mean, it's just a convienience to avoid using remote desktop to change the channel.
So again, seems like either a scam or ripoff to me.
Yea I have to agree. Sometimes techies, (I am a geek too so this hurts but..), are so infactuated with the technology that they can't see how foolish something is. Broadcast TV has been wireless forever, why would I want to layer something more on top of it that I have to pay extra for? I will go buy a TV antenna first. Of course maybe these guys aren't old enough to know what a TV antenna is. Possibly all they know about is cable. I don't understand how anyone would pay for such a thing as this.
that link is in the story dude
;-P
i should know, i'm the submitter
but so should anyone else who took the 3 seconds it took to hoever over the links... less time than it took for you to write your post, that's for sure!
lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
P2P users could relay and share realtime TV transmissions anywhere.
P2P PCs with a TV/Cable/Sat tuner card could act as an audiovisual feed/seed.
Viewers search the network by channel or even by programme name for someone already tuned into a channel and also act as broadcast relay for other viewers.
Some P2P feeds could also allow users to freely channel hop to a desired TV station when the TC card is not in active use.
Super P2P servers could also cache channels or programmes for timeshifted viewing.
This is available in the US too. Sharper Image has them and a few others do too.
I've used the TV itself it's nice - the image can get grainy.
I think that it's actaully Palm based, which would make more sense being that Sony Clie is a Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much.
UID 1000000 is just around the corner.
I live in Japan and often thought of building a box like this to leave in my family's house in the US, so that I can watch my favorite TV programs from here. Fortunately, thanks to bittorrent, I can download all my shows faster and in much higher quality than I could stream live from a home broadband connection. But if there is a worldwide crackdown on BT/P2P/etc., I'll definitely consider doing it myself. Should be easily under $400 to build a box like this.
Well, E (TV, TeeVee) and O (Tivo, TeeVoe) are already taken.
All that leaves is A, I, U, and schwa.
So, they've got TeeVay, TeeVie, TeeView, and TeeVah.
I guess they'd better choose quickly!
No, he did not commit a goof. He clarified something that was unnecessarily obscure from the story submission. I scanned through the three page article in the Times and then noticed that the Cringely link was hidden by being attached to the inverntor's name. That isn't really much of a problem but neither is someone making that link more explicit. You should welcome the added information rather than being pissy about it, I had already read Cringely's article and I'm grateful you brought attention to the corresponding article in the Times.
Snapstream's Beyond TV already allows you to do this with their software (as long as you have a software based TV tuner card). You can stream live, or recorded video over the net at a variety of qualities. I can use it to watch live TV from work at a medium bitrate, or stream high quality video over my network to any screen in the house.
Last I checked, I can't pickup NY stations in California with an Antenna. If your home team is blacked out because it's not sold out then you could watch the game using this device if one was in NY.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Some of the posters seem to be confused as to what, exactly this does. Now, they all seem to get the TV over IP part. Fine.
You buy the box for $6,500.00 and stick it in your house. Then you go off somewhere, let's say a hotel 3,000 miles away, and log in to your stream.
You don't lug the box around. It stays at home.
You don't "get" the Manchester United game or Moscow TV, unless you already could get them. Reread last sentence. Twice.
If you want to stream ESPN, you must already subscribe to ESPN at home. Reread that sentence, if necessary.
You can stream the local, over-the-air channels you might be missing in whatever God-forsaken hotel room you might find yourself in, for free if they are free at your house. At home.
You can stream the cable, satellite, or whatever you pay for and get at home.
What you don't get:
Any channel you can't get at home, now.
Channels you don't pay for now, if they require you to pay at home.
No, you can't say goodbye to the cable company, tear down the dish, or steal the world's broadcast signals unless you already do steal them.
If you need the local news when you're in Bali, it's a workable solution. If you want 2,000 channels you can't get at home while you're in Bali, you still can't get them.
While the terrestrial broadcasters will scream "you're theifing our signal, you bastards," and DirecTV won't give you local channels for the same arguement, that's not the root cause.
It threatens advertising revenue.
Advertising is regional, and there's a strangle-hold on the broadcasters to keep it that way. The advertisers want to squeeze every last schekel out of the consumers, and they adjust market prices per the tolerance of each individual market. When the folks in LA (either one) can see the prices advertised in NYC or DC or anywhere else, the ability to maintain regional pricing structures is eroded. Product revenue will decline as pricing awareness will drive the prices down (or at least to some median level.)
In order to prevent this, the regional broadcasters will provide a "national content" feed that has different "national level" adverts instead of the regional ones. But they'll squeal like a stuck pig if you re-show the DC ads in Chicago. If you're outside of a major metro area, you can get CBSE or CBSW channels on DirecTV. They're the East and West "national" channels for the major network. It's the same programming, only with different adverts. And no, I don't get to watch those channels because I'm too close to DC.
Don't worry, it's just circletimessquare, a notorious dimwit on several boards. He's also quite loud and obnoxious, but ultimately harmless as he conveys the same authority on matters as a profiterole.
Looking at the Specs on the Sony site - they specfically don't mention what the operating system is - only the browser software - which is NOT Microsoft, and listing the format of files it will read. The browser has a tab capability - and brings up a QWERTY keyboard on the touch screen for web serfing. It also reads Sony Memory sticks (big surprise) - and can take a External keyboard through the USB port. As well - it has TV remote control software and Picture-in-Picture. I don't know what much about the Palm thin client OS - but could it handle all of that? It looks like a implentation of some sort of UNIX or maybe even a Linix port. Odd that they won't mention it in any of their material. Maybe it's a custom port of the PS/2 softwre (grin).
I'm doing this exact same thing right now. I bought a $300 p4-3ghz from dell. I bought a $30 tv wonder pci card for it.
it shipped with microsoft windows home. i downloaded microsoft media encoder 9, which uses an mpeg-4 based compression anyways.
i restricted the outgoing ip to only my work and my home. i set the computer up at my dad's apt, where he wouldn't care if i saturated his up speed..
then i installed vnc on it, since windows xp home doesn't have remote desktop.
yay. I win. and it cost me $300. not to mention I have a remote access desktop that I can setup whatever services i want.
hell for a $1000 i'd fly to your house and set it all up for you, and you'd still save over $5000 from what that dude is asking.
AND...
doing it this way works on macs. they just need to download windows media player 9. most windows users don't even have to download any new software to view it.
Blockbuster lately, but network programing is increasingly finding its way into the DVD market. Of course it doesn't help that most downloaded TV programs are stripped of commercial. You know their advertisers don't care that you missed West Wing, they only care that you missed their expensive advertising spot(s).
Quack, quack.
Actually, I did admit my bad. Hence my statement "my bad". I'm not sure how I could make that any more clear for you... perhaps a dissection of my comment, word for word? The fact is that you used bad link etiquette. As for "being on the wrong drugs" being seen as a personal attack, if I had meant it to be one, I simply would have called you an idiot or similar. Realistically, all you have done is ignore etiquette, which might make you rude, but does not mean that you are stupid. If I can clear up any other aspects of my above comment for you, or any other comments I have made on slashdot, let me know and I'll be glad to help.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is already being done. Simply hack a TiVo to allow real time viewing of MPEG2, setup a Linux server to recompress the video for broadband, and go. If you have as much money as this product targets you can even Slashdot DSL or equivlent and a 768kbps upstream should give a viewable quality.
Lets see. $100 DirecTiVo, $1000 linux box, $100/mo. Much cheaper than TV4ME.
Real markets an encoding card called the Osprey (the -500 DV is the top-of-the-line that they sell) that apparently will convert NTSC or even DV signals into streaming video for web distribution.
Cost? $895. Seems trivial for the transmission. If you use VNC or something customized from VNC (ah, the beauty of open source) to change the channels remotely, you've got your high-quality server for under $1000.
"Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much."
I guess I spoke too soon. That's a good point though. The interface is very nice, clean and curvy. It very well could be anything - probably not Palm. *shurgs*
UID 1000000 is just around the corner.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028. html
I'm in Denver, and don't have cable. However, my parents (in Cleveland), happen to subscribe to an uber-cable offering of just about everything available [over 300 channels]. We both have broadband as well. So, it was a simple matter to drop a $30 bttv card in the linux box working as a firewall at their house, and build an IR transmitter to control a dedicated cable decoder box. Mpeg4 at 512 kilobit is perfectly watchable, especially at 320x240 resolution. I recommend downloading ffmpeg if you are interested in doing the same.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
I do this every day, remote and everything and it didnt cost me anything. $50 tuner card is all hardware thats required (oh and the $400 pocketpc)
TV Input -> Windows Media Encoder -> Windows Media Streaming server
oh and to do the remote, Remote Desktop to my home pc and then remote desktop to my pocketpc from there (forgot the software, m$ provides it free) into my pocketpc sitting in it's cradle and control the channels from there.
Not only can I stream my 800 channels of satellite with uber quality from my broadband at home, but I can also stream hdtv sources on my computer, or any of the 7 discs in my dvd player.
Anyone wanna pay me $6500 to implement???
It is ridiculous to realize how much interesting programming there is in the rest of the world that we still can't watch here.
There should be some sort of fair use that would allow citizens to stream channels that are for whatever reason not broadcast here.
The inventor has a good idea but Sony beat him to the mass market. Yesterday I was able to configure and test a 12" Sony LocationFree TV. I enjoy setting up and testing other peoples toys. It works with it's own AP, or the in house AP's and over the net. Designed for near Luddites, lots of fun watching your TV from a wireless connection to the internet. Just remember to RTFM and you will be FINE.
Sony has a similar idea with LocationFree TV. You get an LCD that can get TV both wirelessly when you're at home, as well as streamed over the Internet when you're not.
press release
SonyStyle store
The inovative part of the technology is that you can watch LIVE television from somewhere else in the world at excellent quality. Who though, actually needs their programs live? If I'm in London and my computer in New York has The Apprentice on at 9pm EST. I am not going to watching that show live. I will be asleep. I can watch it when I get up in the morning. There are many easy cheaper solutions for getting prerecorded shows transferred over the internet. The only thing this is really good for is people who have to watch xyz show RIGHT NOW! Nice try, but it's not going to fly.
The comment has already been made. Let's move it along people. Nothing to see here.
If you're still around...what platform/software are you using to stream ATI's AIW over the internet?? I'm guessing with an ATI, you're not using a NIX. Anyway, I'm aware of ATI's bundled software that can share the EASYVIEW over a LAN, but what do you use over the internet? WMP encoder?
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go kenny