The Challenges and Rewards of 'Place-Shifting'

Grooves writes "Ars Technica has an insightful look at the challenges facing place-shifting. The article talks about new European legislation that could require broadcast licensing for all place-shifting devices, and they review some of the fair use problems in the US and how they could hurt innovation." From the article: "A few cables here, a few networking adjustments there, and you can use a product like the Slingbox or the software-based Orb to watch your TV (or TiVo, or DVD player) from just about anywhere you can get a network connection, be it your office, your hotel room, or the other side of the planet. Yet what makes place-shifting devices so powerful also makes them appear very dangerous to established entertainment and media companies."

Comments

No way to stop it.

[jimbogun]

They can legislate all they want, but enforcing is a different issue. Just as there is no evil bit to stop terrorists, there is no bit that can be easily detected to see if someone is broadcasting media. True something could be created to detect if mpg files or other standard video files are being played, but that takes a lot of work and can be easily encrypted.

The devices they legislate could easily be identified if it comes as a box (Slingbox). The software versions will be impossible to legislate without the software creators cooperation, and without it they will have to turn to computer hardware vendors. They will need to legislate computers with capture devices and a network interface. This could be simplified by legistaling all capture devices, like how HD tv capture cards have to have the broadcast bit. The capture cards would have to encrypt it to something only a licensed software product could read (and of course the encryption would eventually be broken). This encrypting could be worked around with a video/audio capture program because you have to play it somewhere for a capture device to be useful, but this would be a huge deterrent.

My two cents: Accept the reality that it is. Crack down on pirates (unlicensed distributers of copyrighted materials), but let people who just want to watch something they've legally recorded anywhere they want.

its just data

[gsn]

"...a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city."

I really don't get the MLB guy's argument that I'm stealing from the guy in Chicago. Does he expect me to pay some cable operator in Chicago to watch one game while I'm visiting? If the game is playing in a bar I could just watch it free, and my watching it doesn't add to their revenues.

The only way this makes sense is if they can sell me the rights to watch the game while I'm travelling over the web or PPV. But I've already bought the right to watch the game in SF... I paid for access to the *content*. THats where the difference in thinking is - Buisness wants me to pay for the content on a particular delivery system or a different media. Wouldn't it be just wonderful if they could charge you $5 for content on your iPod and $10 if you want your game streamed over the web to your laptop in your Chicago hotel room, $15 if you want a DVD of it.

But the whole point is irrespective of what the content I paid for is its still just data and if you put data and a computer and a network together then you are simply not going to be able to keep control over it...unless you can control what users can do with their computers and what what networks can do. Out of curiostiy whats happening with network neutrality and does anyone remember that Trusted computing/TCPA/Palladium thing...