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:
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.
External links
Sources and notes
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