Placeshifting Archives - Page 10 of 12

Personal Placeshifting Not Yet Dead

In the era of widespread and freely provided web video (of questionably quality and selection), it’s heartening to see personal placeshifting technology initiatives continue to blossom. Last week, Apple stalwart Elgato provided a EyeTV software update (v3.3) to enable remote web-based playback (including Mobile Safari/iPhone! over 3G!) of live and recorded content sourced from your … Read more

End of the Road for SlingCatcher?

Less than a year on the market, the SlingCatcher‘s entrance fee has dropped by 2/3rds from retail launch pricing of $300 down to a rock bottom $99.99 at Best Buy. I can only assume sales have been horrible. Which pains me on personal level. The digital media Swiss Army knife vision of the SlingCatcher was … Read more

EyeTV Releases Placeshifting iPhone App

EyeTV, the OS X DVR software and television tuning/encoding hardware provider, receives a companion iPhone app today. The $5 EyeTV for iPhone (iTunes link) provides access to both live and recorded content originating from your Mac, which needs to be running the new EyeTV 3.2 update. While a prior iteration of EyeTV enabled local streaming … Read more

The New iPhone Apps of the Week

Hava Mobile Hava support seemed to think it’d be a few weeks before Apple unleashed their placeshifting app, but here we are. And, as expected, you’ll only be able stream video from your Hava box over WiFi. (You can blame AT&T for that.) Somewhat unexpected is the $10 Hava Mobile fee, which flies in the … Read more

Hava iPhone Client Submitted to Apple

Hava’s iPhone placeshifting client has been submitted to Apple for approval, according to email correspondence from customer service staff. Like their Slingbox competition, I suspect we’ll most likely end up with another crippled WiFi-only release due to AT&T’s non-net neutral policies. (Although, the FCC is expected to say something on this matter today.) I first took the Hava mobile software for a spin back at CES using an iPod Touch (pic above). At that time it wasn’t nearly as polished as their fine Nokia Maemo client. So I assume the intervening months have been put to good use in perfecting the experience.

Ad Skipping, I Knew You When…

TV Everywhere breakfast

The end of commercial skipping as we know it is near. You knew this was coming when Hulu became popular despite its few, but un-skippable ads. You knew it was coming when the Time Warner Cable Start Over service began making the rounds with the on-demand fast-forward function disabled. You knew it was around the corner when the MPAA started making a fuss about Selective Output Control (SOC) to block DVR recording on early-release HD movies. Sadly, you pretty much knew it was inevitable from the first blissful moment you used a DVR.

Yesterday, at a TV Everywhere breakfast event hosted by Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable, CEO Quincy Smith of CBS Interactive mentioned the bugaboo of ad skipping in a throw-away comment at the end of the session. While most of the discussion centered on how to get TV Everywhere deployed, there was also some talk about why content owners and distributors should work to make it happen. There are lots of reasons, and everyone sees that the TV paradigm is shifting. But there’s also the convenient side benefit that making content available over IP also makes it a lot easier to block commercial skipping. In fact, if the advertising industry could figure a better way to quantify online TV advertising, we’d probably have an awful lot more premium TV content on the Internet today. There’s a lot of money to recoup from the fragmenting of audiences and decreasing TV ad spends.

In short, while TV Everywhere is going to be great for all of us – expanded availability of content we’ve already paid for – it’s not going to come without some consumer disadvantages in the long run. Such is the way of the TV revolution, and the capitalist market.

The Limits of Online Video

Dollhouse Epitaph 1

Last night I had one of those moments – scratch that, one of those hours – which illustrates exactly why TV is still the best medium for television shows. I’m a big fan of Hulu, and I love that I can catch the occasional old episode of Bones or Thirty Rock on my netbook while hitting the treadmill or cleaning the kitchen. However, by far the best TV experience for me still comes from pointing my remote at the big screen in my living room. Here’s why.

I discovered recently that an un-aired episode of Dollhouse, Epitaph 1, had made its way to iTunes (Amazon VOD, too), where the Whedon show has been exceedingly popular. I instantly plunked down the $2.99 and started downloading the HD version to my trusty Eee PC. Since the episode was a 676MB file, I left my computer running and checked in later… only to discover that my PC had done an automatic update and automatically shut itself down. Begin download take two.

The second download worked fine, and last night I set things up to watch the coveted episode on our big screen TV. I plugged the netbook in to the TV with a VGA cable and connected the audio up to some living-room speakers. Brilliant, right? Hardly. I assumed that since the show was downloaded and not streaming, and since I had successfully watched crystal-clear HD content on my Eee PC before, that porting over to the big screen would not be a problem. Unfortunately, my poor little netbook didn’t have the horsepower to carry it off. First came the stuttering, and then came the abrupt, no-warning shut-down of my computer.

TiVo’s Billion: Spending their jackpot in a day.

During their ten year history, TiVo’s obituary has been written more times than I’ve sat through an entire commercial, yet no matter how steep the climb, TiVo has continued to defy critics and skeptics alike by chugging along.

Even though the financial wiz kids over at Engadget, still have TiVo on their “death watch”, I’m beginning to see a much different picture. With 6 quarters of EBITA profitability now under their belt, $200 million in cash (minus the zero in debt on their balance sheet), and partnerships with a significant portion of the DVR market waiting to be implemented and rolled out, it’s no surprise that TiVo has gone from being a small cap child with plenty of dissenters, to an emerging mid cap teenager looking to establish a legacy.

The last ten years may have been characterized by one rumor after another of who TiVo was going to be acquired by next, but the next ten years will be a much different chapter for the little DVR that could. At the risk of counting my chickens before they hatch (I’m a TiVo shareholder), I wanted to kick off the next ten years of innovation by highlighting a few companies that TiVo could use to transition themselves from a niche DVR provider to a diversified corporate conglomerate. Of course there’s no guarantee that TiVo will even get the billion dollars that they are asking for, but it’s fun to spend imaginary money.