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To watch or listen to a video or audio program in a different venue. Digital media hubs let you watch videos and look at photos on your TV that are stored in your computer, and wireless viewers retrieve your media while you move around the house. Sling Media's Slingbox www.slingmedia.com.does the opposite. It streams TV, cable, satellite and DVR programs to any local or remote PC. Contrast with timeshifting. See digital media hub.

Podcasts Are Placeshifted

Podcasts are a type of placeshifting because radio broadcasts are heard from a portable digital media player, rather than a regular radio or Internet radio. See podcast.



 
 
Wikipedia: placeshifting

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.

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

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 in the electronic workshop of Ken Schaffer in Mid-Town Manhattan and his home away from home lab in Moscow, Russia. At first as someone inspired into the world of electronic innovation by Sputnik, he called it spaceshifting. (4 October 1957). To much acclaim Schaffer had shifted Soviet television space to American universities, starting with Columbia University during the cold war 1980s.

To make his 21st century take on spaceshifting in his latest invention, 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, place shifting. Among the early adopters was the musician StingSting was the first to take to Schaffer's product, TV2ME, as a device that let him watch his beloved British football team as he toured. Schaffer began working on in 2001, inspired by his frustration at missing episodes of Seinfeld, Ted Koppel and the Sopranos. Schaffer and his team of Turkish, Russian and French programmer developed a circuitry that allowed the MPEG-4 circuitry widely used for basic video compression to operate more efficiently and to generate a near-broadcasting quality picture.

About 10 years later, 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.

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 be proven and PayTV and Content providers are wary of the initial unsecure versions of this technology.

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Sources and notes


     
     

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    Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Placeshifting" Read more

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