Get Your Broadcast TV Anywhere

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."

Comments

icravetv

[minus_273]

i wonder how long before this becomes icravetv part deux

Stand by for lawsuits

[LostCluster]

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.

Re:Stand by for lawsuits

[vidarh]

The one hope this has, is that it apparently has protection built in to ensure that it's only used as a "virtual extension cord". I.e. you need to have a cable subscription, and presumably you can still only receive one channel at a time, an to one location at a time. That makes it a lot more likely that you can argue that it's not fundamentally different from for instance time shifting with a VCR, which is allowed.

Re:Stand by for lawsuits

[3terrabyte]

No kidding. With all the RIAA-google-new-alerts I get everyday, half are talking about TV shows being shared to be the next big attack.

Personally, I don't understand the problem. I missed West Wing 2 weeks ago because Lost is on at the same time (unknown to me, but TIVO did it), so I downloaded it from NG. Wouldn't the networks WANT me to keep up to date on my zombie-ness in keeping up with "must-see tv" ?

I can understand the commercial problem and HBO type shows, but free tv shows?

Anyway, it's not going to fly. Especially if this guy is going to make any money from this service.

name

[eyeball]

...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.

Re:Robert Cringely Is a big fan of TV2Me

[Anonymous Coward]

THANKS for reposting the SAME EXACT LINK from the summary... why it was even the FIRST link! Karma whore.

Blame the guy who provided the summary. I don't see why the guy's name should be associated with Cringely's column about the product. If anything, shouldn't the name reference either a personal website or his e-mail address? Plus, Cringely's column was from a month ago. Silly me for expecting /. would only contain references to new material... (cue the "you must be new around here" meme.)

Snapstream is similar

[rjelks]

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??

Seems like a scam to me, or at least a ripoff.

[Guspaz]

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.

Re:Streaming news from Russia

[jerw134]

If you had actually read the article, it says that he has actually tweaked the MPEG-4 codec. Reworking a whole codec is not as simple as changing the bitrate in a configuration file.

I don't know if you've been to your local

[msimm]

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).