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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.
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.
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
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.
mpeg2 = 20mbps
(mpeg2)/2 = (20mbps)/2
mpeg = 10mbps
mpeg4 = 4*10mbps
mpeg4 = 40 mbps
Correct me if I'm wrong... but I think the maths are right.
(it's a joke kids, everybody chuckle a little... now go back to work.)
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 $1800 (Cdn) or from Sonystyle.ca directly. It's basically a Small TV set tablet with a 802.11 link to a base station that streams the video to the tablet and even lets you serf the net with a little browser.
Sorry - don't know what operating system they're using - it looks like a custom UNIX setup.
I did RTFA, and I still didn't see anything special here. The quality issues with streaming video isn't the capture card (Fine, maybe you'd need a 100$ 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.
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.