Placeshifting

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Placeshifting can be defined as watching or listening to live, recorded or stored media on a remote device via the internet or over a data network. This is not to be confused with time shifting, which is watching or listening to recorded media locally. There are two kinds of placeshifting. Placeshifting from a consumer electronics device like a TV or cable box or placeshifting from a PC. There are a few devices which currently 'placeshift' media such as cable television or satellite television, including Tv2Me, Sling Media's Slingbox and Sony's LocationFree. These devices allow a person to access their home entertainment system, and stream media nearly instantaneously to their computer or mobile device. Several companies have also developed PC programs which allow consumers to 'placeshift' media stored on their PCs to a remote device. Companies which provide PC software are Orb, Avvenu, Sharpcast, CMWare, and Oxy Systems.

1 How does placeshifting work?
2 History
3 Legal Issues
4 External links
5 Sources and notes

[edit] How does placeshifting work?

Placeshifting works essentially by capturing an output and streaming it and displaying it in another location. Placeshifting from Sling Media would look like this:

The video signal comes descrambled out of the S Video connection on the cable box and is directed to the Slingbox where it is transcoded into MPEG 4 and sent to a PC

[edit] History

The history of place shifting both commercially and legally begins with time shifting. Time Shifting is the ability to watch content in a desired time slot. The best examples of time shifting are the VCR and DVR.

Placeshifting began when two brothers traveling on a business trip remarked to one another how they were missing a playoff baseball game back home. From that one trip emerged the idea for the Slingbox from Sling Media. Released as a consumer electronic product in the summer of 2005, the Slingbox allows you to take the feed from your cable or satellite set top box and send it to your computer over any broadband connection, thereby placeshifting the TV signal from one location to another. While people have recently been placeshifting TV, people have been place shifting their work longer. In the late 1990s, Citrix released its platform which allowed users to remotely access content stored or applications run on a server. People away from the office working on remote PCs could have the same kind of access, applications and computer power as if they were at the office. Symantec released PCAnywhere which allowed the user to remotely access a computer and take control of it. Now PC users could access not only the programs they use at work, but their actual work PC. The natural evolution of technologies is from retail offerings through accessory and then the final inevitable step of the embedding of the technology. Placeshifting is no different and we are now seeing offerings that are built into the 'Set Top Box' (STB), this along with conditional access DRM will be the final stage in the mass market adoption of this new technology, this approach is led by INXSTOR.

[edit] Legal Issues

As the technology continues to improve, legal issues stemming from the copyright usage of rebroadcast of media have begun. However, precedents in former legal cases have suggested that due to the personal nature of the rebroadcast, placeshifting does not violate the copyrights. This has yet to proven and PayTV and Content providers are wary of the initial unsecure versions of this technology.