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 and Monsoon HAVA. 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, Oxy Systems, and SageTV.

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[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:

Image:Placeshifing_Image3.jpg

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

In next generation technology the transcoding is completed inside the set top box maintining the quality of video as well as the security of content, as in the EDMS system created by NXVision. This does away with the requirement for another piece of hardware to clutter the living room.

[edit] History

The history of placeshifting 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 in the electronic workshop of Ken Schaffer in Manhattan and his home away from home in Moscow, Russia. Inspired into the world of electronic innovation by Sputnik. To much acclaim Schaffer shifted Soviet television space to American universities, starting with Columbia University during the cold war 1980s.

To make his 21st century take on spaceshifting, Schaffer introduced TV2Me "A way to make home TV reception portable -- with high -quality pictures to be watched, and channels to be changed, form anywhere in the world that the internet can reach"

Easier for non-specialists to understand, he recoined it with the more commercial cultural term, placeshifting. Schaffer was inspired by his frustration at missing episodes of Seinfeld, Ted Koppel and the Sopranos as he traveled between New York and St. Petersburg. Schaffer developed software and a circuitry that controlled his home cable box and TiVo DVR and allowed video compression to operate more efficiently and to generate a near-broadcast quality picture. Prominent among TV2Me early adopters was the musician Sting who, beginning in 2003, used TV2Me to stay with his beloved Newcastle football team wherever he toured.

Two years later, brother Blake and Jason Krikorian, away on a business trip, found themselves missing a playoff baseball game back home. From that trip emerged Slingbox. Released as a consumer electronic product in the summer of 2005, the Slingbox allows users to take the feed from their cable or satellite set top box and over any broadband connection, placeshifting the TV signal. from one location to another. The Slingbox was designed as a consumer product, and is widely available. While people have recently been placeshifting TV, people have been using another form of placeshifting much longer. In the late 1990s, Citrix released a 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. Placeshifting, as most technologies, appeared first as an expensive general-purpose device using discrete components TV2Me and eventually as a low-cost, mass-produced, embedded technology [Slingbox] It is expected that placeshifting capbility will eventually 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 NXVision.

[edit] Legal Issues

Placeshifting raises legal questions in the area of intellectual property stemming from the rebroadcast of copyrighted media; these theoretical debates have become increasingly relevant as the technology has become easier to use and more widespread. Proponents of the technology stress the similarities to time shifting, the practice of which has been upheld in jurisdictions across the world, most famously in the United States under Sony v. Universal (1984), also known as the "Betamax case." They argue that the personal nature of the rebroadcast makes it a non-infringing fair use, and that since these technologies are marketed on the basis of their substantial non-infringing uses, that the Sony test is satisfied in the United States. In this line of reasoning, placeshifting is similar to the type of space shifting allowed by portable MP3 players, which was upheld in RIAA v. Diamond in 1999.[1] Commercially available technologies avoid the sort of centralized storage that, by contrast, have generally been held to be infringing, such as in UMG v. MP3.com (2000) and A&M Records v. Napster (2001). However, no example of the technology has yet been tested in court. Opponents argue that current examples of placeshifting are insecure, lacking DRM, and also enabling widespread rebroadcasting to multiple users in a way that would clearly infringe on copyright. Some of the commercially available products contain restrictions in order to address these concerns; for example, the Slingbox only allows access by one computer at a time.

The new technology approach for delivering TV to Mobile led by NXVision offers a secure technology solution that preserves the media rights of the content owner.

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