Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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*...
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).
Seems to me this could be easily done if your DVR box can be assigned an IP. I don't know how many, probrably none, have this capability, but with some mods I could see making my DVR box a server or at the least somehow tieing into my PC so I can pull the data from it. Of course, the high quality streaming video over the internet will be a challenge.
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
A high-def mpeg2 stream requires about 20mbps ... anyone know how much a similar quality mpeg4 stream takes?
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.
Copyright owners still have to abide by fairuse. If someone records something at home on whatever media they choose they have the option of viewing that media at a later time.
This just changes the type of media we are using.
It's not going to go anywhere anyway. Not enough people are going to pay $6500+ for a proprietary system that delivers their TV shows elsewhere. You can get much less expensive alternatives that use software to do exactly the same thing.
They idolize him like some sort of genius. In fact one of the articles even said that.
.conf file to have a higher bitrate too. All I need is a server connected to a fast pipe.
If I was a billionare able to employ such a venture, I could have done it too. I just don't have the money to get dedicated oc256 lines to 'stream' all the high quality video.
All this tech is, is higher quality streams. It still uses the same technology as traditional streams, just in higher bitrates. (E.G. Higher server bills, e.g. why it's so expensive)
If I was a billionare I could easily edit a
How does having money for a dedicated server and the ability to boost up the bitrate of a broadcast make you a "true genius in normal mens clothing"?
Setting up a high quality stream of licensed video from local TV stations is NOT genius, it just takes a wad of cash to do, that's all.
Too bad I'm not rich... I could then have gotton richer by doing this first.
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.
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.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
if it meant you were still watching the commercials.
An excllent way to increase viewership would be to offer Torrent's of programs for free(torrents because this would save on bandwidth) WITH commericals. Yeah Commericals suck, but they pay for the programing. You could then download that episode of the West Wing if you missed it.
Of course this would never happen. The number one reason is that it would be way to easy to devise a program to parse through the show and delete out the commericals. That and the MPAA has shown they are impervious to the benifits of new tech coming out automaticly assuming it is going to aid piracy and decrease thier market share.
But if they could look pass that proverbial nose...