Dave digs the TiVo Stream, and has a professional history with Sling, but those guys aren’t the only placeshifting players in town. Morega is another contender, powering the DirecTV Nomad box and with other deals in place for its media networking software. I know this in part because I’ve been doing some indirect work for the company, but also because Morega has been upping its profile in the cable space. I can’t say my perspective is unbiased on this one, but Morega has some cool stuff going on.
First off, the Morega software does streaming and syncing of content coming in through your TV. Depending on how a provider wants to use the technology, you can:
- Stream live or recorded TV to other devices (locally or beyond)
- Sync recorded TV to a mobile device for offline viewing
And, at the SCTE Cable-Tec Expo show last week, Morega showed off quad-stream transcoding, i.e. four streams transcoded at once so that you can be moving lots of different content around to lots of different places. (Shot above shows real-time transcoding displayed on a laptop screen for demo purposes)
Morega doesn’t make boxes, so there’s no hardware product to buy. But the company is licensing its software to pay-TV providers for use in streamers and gateways. The software also sits on network servers, and on client devices like smartphones and tablets.
And on the pay-TV provider front, Morega has one other card to play: an analytics and advertising solution. As a consumer of course I’d rather not have to deal with new ads, targeted or not, but if that’s what funds more content flexibility, I’ll take it. TV everywhere? Maybe we’re getting closer.