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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."
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
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.
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*...
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
A high-def mpeg2 stream requires about 20mbps ... anyone know how much a similar quality mpeg4 stream takes?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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