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Get Your Broadcast TV Anywhere

Posted by michael on from the your-ideas-intrigue-me dept.

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."

4 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. It isn't a matter of getting TV.. by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    It's a matter of TV carrying what you want to watch. I want to watch TV (sports in particular) from other countries, but thanks to NTSC/PAL and a lack of willingness by fatcats at cable companies (who believe that's not what the public wants: Self full-filling prophecy) it's not on the menu or ever likely to be.

    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
  2. Re:$6,000 !!! No thanks. by Guspaz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I did RTFA, and I still didn't see anything special here. The quality issues with streaming video isn't the capture card (Fine, maybe you'd need a 100$ capture card instead of a 30$ capture card, but not 6000), but with the actual compression itself. And I highly doubt that this solution, considering how hacked together it is, contains a revolutionary new video codec that could substantially improve quality.

    I can't think of anything this special capture card might do that would be worth anything over a normal capture card. Even a hardware MPEG-4 encoder would be pointless considering how this device is a regular PC and can encode in software without problem.

  3. Re:Stand by for lawsuits (or not) by UID1000000 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. Great for homesick ex-pats by jettoblack · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.