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Television Media The Internet

Get Your Broadcast TV Anywhere 186

Posted by michael from the your-ideas-intrigue-me dept.
circletimessquare writes "Ken Schaffer, who made his name inventing a wireless microphone and a satellite telephone service, has a new offering called TV2Me. It's basically MPEG-4, improved upon, that allows for what he calls 'best of class' streaming video over a normal broadband connection. Right now, his only clients are rich sports fanatics, but he eventually wants to make his technology as ubiquitous and as essential as TiVo is to some."
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Get Your Broadcast TV Anywhere More

Get Your Broadcast TV Anywhere

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  • Streaming news from Russia (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:10PM (#10975597)
    Finally, some fair and balanced news.
    • In Mother Russia, the people report the news.
    • They idolize him like some sort of genius. In fact one of the articles even said that.

      If I was a billionare able to employ such a venture, I could have done it too. I just don't have the money to get dedicated oc256 lines to 'stream' all the high quality video.

      All this tech is, is higher quality streams. It still uses the same technology as traditional streams, just in higher bitrates. (E.G. Higher server bills, e.g. why it's so expensive)

      If I was a billionare I could easily edit a .conf file to have a h
      • If you had actually read the article, it says that he has actually tweaked the MPEG-4 codec. Reworking a whole codec is not as simple as changing the bitrate in a configuration file.
    • Too bad Pravda reads like the National Enquiror. I swear they talk about Stigmata like every week.

  • icravetv (Score:3, Insightful)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 ) <{aaaaa} {at} {SPAM.yahoo.com}> on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:11PM (#10975608) Journal
    i wonder how long before this becomes icravetv part deux
    • I LOVED icravetv.com I would do my homework and watch Star Trek (my brother always hogged the living room tv and we could never agree on watching the same shows).

      Personally, I think the networks should EMBRACE this medium. They do not to pay cable tv providers AND they can charge more for advertisers....why can they charge more for advertisers you ask? Because each viewer needs an account. With this account you can specify the type of advertising you want to be inundated with (not specifying this will

  • MPAA grumbles (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Didn't a guy get sued a while back for providing a VCR like function over the internet. The best reference I could find was from geek.com [geek.com] anyone with more info on how this one wont get sued.

  • Robert X Cringely... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Sirch ( 82595 )
    Our favorite geek writer covered this in a nice piece about a month ago [pbs.org].

    • erm (Score:3, Informative)

      by circletimessquare ( 444983 )
      that link is in the story dude

      i should know, i'm the submitter

      but so should anyone else who took the 3 seconds it took to hoever over the links... less time than it took for you to write your post, that's for sure!

      lol ;-P

  • Stand by for lawsuits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:13PM (#10975629)
    Hollywood isn't going to stand for this.

    It's the reason why we have region-encoding on DVDs, DirecTV can only give the NYC and LA "locals" to people in the boonies, and ICraveTV [com.com] didn't fly. The NFL and DirecTV make millions off of their Sunday Ticket package which is based on selling for hundreds of dollars a season the right to recieve games freely broadcasted in other parts of the USA.

    Copyright owners are declaring boundries across which their content cannot move freely, and they're going to crush any technology that threatens to make it easy to break those lines.
    • The one hope this has, is that it apparently has protection built in to ensure that it's only used as a "virtual extension cord". I.e. you need to have a cable subscription, and presumably you can still only receive one channel at a time, an to one location at a time. That makes it a lot more likely that you can argue that it's not fundamentally different from for instance time shifting with a VCR, which is allowed.
    • No kidding. With all the RIAA-google-new-alerts I get everyday, half are talking about TV shows being shared to be the next big attack.

      Personally, I don't understand the problem. I missed West Wing 2 weeks ago because Lost is on at the same time (unknown to me, but TIVO did it), so I downloaded it from NG. Wouldn't the networks WANT me to keep up to date on my zombie-ness in keeping up with "must-see tv" ?

      I can understand the commercial problem and HBO type shows, but free tv shows?

      Anyway, it's not going

      • Personally, I don't understand the problem. I missed West Wing 2 weeks ago because Lost is on at the same time (unknown to me, but TIVO did it), so I downloaded it from NG. Wouldn't the networks WANT me to keep up to date on my zombie-ness in keeping up with "must-see tv" ?

        Yeah, if it meant you were still watching the commercials. Most downloaded programs cut those out.

        The networks would much rather have you wait until the DVD boxed set comes out so you can buy what you watched for free eight months pri
        • I'm all for the argument about DVD box sets, but until they start promising an exact timetable, and guarantee every show will be available, no one will wait for a 'maybe'.

          There are some shows that probably have no chance of being released on DVD. Is it morally wrong to download Gomer Pyle?

          What about Olympic events this year? Or 1984 Gymnastics Gold Medal events? Anyway, I don't really have a point....

        • if it meant you were still watching the commercials.

          An excllent way to increase viewership would be to offer Torrent's of programs for free(torrents because this would save on bandwidth) WITH commericals. Yeah Commericals suck, but they pay for the programing. You could then download that episode of the West Wing if you missed it.

          Of course this would never happen. The number one reason is that it would be way to easy to devise a program to parse through the show and delete out the commericals. That an
      • Blockbuster lately, but network programing is increasingly finding its way into the DVD market. Of course it doesn't help that most downloaded TV programs are stripped of commercial. You know their advertisers don't care that you missed West Wing, they only care that you missed their expensive advertising spot(s).
    • Seems to me this could be easily done if your DVR box can be assigned an IP. I don't know how many, probrably none, have this capability, but with some mods I could see making my DVR box a server or at the least somehow tieing into my PC so I can pull the data from it. Of course, the high quality streaming video over the internet will be a challenge.
      • As to assigning an IP address to a DVR Box, Sony is promoting it's Location Free TV as being able to stream your TV shows to anyplace on the internet.
        http://www.sonystyle.ca/view/LocationFreeTVLanding /index.shtml?storeId=10001&langId=-1&catalogId=100 01&categoryId=47640 [sonystyle.ca]
        Maybe because it's only being offered in Canada right now they're getting around the MPAA - but what is there to keep someone from setting this up in Canada and running it and accessing from a Wi-Fi hotspot in the Excited
        • This is available in the US too. Sharper Image has them and a few others do too.

          I've used the TV itself it's nice - the image can get grainy.

          I think that it's actaully Palm based, which would make more sense being that Sony Clie is a Palm OS. It's a thin client OS, I know that much.

      • I do not see why you could not do this with MythTV. You also do not have to have a static IP to do this. Dynamic DNS and port forwarding should handle it for you. Use VideoLan for the server and it shoudld be workable. Now getting it over you cell phone would be the next step. How long before we see more Television shows broadcasting on the Internet?
        • I've even seen plugins for some of the free / cheap timeshifting programs out there that let you control and view it from a web connection.

          In this case it isn't live, it's nearly live; Even poorly encoded MPEG2 is gonna eat 1-2 Mbps. So you're definitely following a download/view metaphor...
        • "Now getting it over you cell phone would be the next step"

          I think you just put your finger on what makes this "dangerous" technology. There are some very rich people/companies that want this sort of capability (delivering content to your cellphone, PSP, or Nintendo DS) to be a service that only they are allowed to sell. Having people use equipment they have purchased and services they are paying for reconfigured to take advantage of what the technology has to offer is something that won't simply be accept
      • Seems to me this could be easily done if your DVR box can be assigned an IP
        All but the earliest unhacked TiVos can be. In all others, you're given the standard IP configuration questions (IP address, DNS, Netmask, default route) when you configure your USB-Ethernet/802.11 interface. Or you can just use DHCP, of course.

    • Re:Stand by for lawsuits (Score:3, Interesting)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) *
      Copyright owners are declaring boundries across which their content cannot move freely, and they're going to crush any technology that threatens to make it easy to break those lines.

      Copyright owners still have to abide by fairuse. If someone records something at home on whatever media they choose they have the option of viewing that media at a later time.

      This just changes the type of media we are using.

      It's not going to go anywhere anyway. Not enough people are going to pay $6500+ for a proprietary sy
  • $6500! Don't think I'll be getting one any time soon...
  • Cringely had an article about this a few months back http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20041028. html/ [pbs.org]. He gives a good overview of the tech and why it is so cool.
    • THANKS for reposting the SAME EXACT LINK from the summary... why it was even the FIRST link! Karma whore.

      • Re:Robert Cringely Is a big fan of TV2Me (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        THANKS for reposting the SAME EXACT LINK from the summary... why it was even the FIRST link! Karma whore.

        Blame the guy who provided the summary. I don't see why the guy's name should be associated with Cringely's column about the product. If anything, shouldn't the name reference either a personal website or his e-mail address? Plus, Cringely's column was from a month ago. Silly me for expecting /. would only contain references to new material... (cue the "you must be new around here" meme.)

  • $6,000 !!! No thanks. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 8400_RPM ( 716968 )
    Thats a bit pricey IMO.

    You could buy a copy of win2k3 and enable streaming video + a $30 ati wonder card and do the same thing....

    • No you can't, not w/ the same picture quality that this guy's tech provides. The $6000 custom video capture card is the big deal. If you would have RTFA you would have known that, you also would have known that in theory this card could be mass produced for ~$100 once the ASICs were designed.

      • Re:$6,000 !!! No thanks. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:48PM (#10975984)
        I did RTFA, and I still didn't see anything special here. The quality issues with streaming video isn't the capture card (Fine, maybe you'd need a 100$ capture card instead of a 30$ capture card, but not 6000), but with the actual compression itself. And I highly doubt that this solution, considering how hacked together it is, contains a revolutionary new video codec that could substantially improve quality.

        I can't think of anything this special capture card might do that would be worth anything over a normal capture card. Even a hardware MPEG-4 encoder would be pointless considering how this device is a regular PC and can encode in software without problem.
        • New technology - high price. Give it some time and the price comes down. My friend bought a top of the line Dell XPS - cost him 5 grand. I bought it 6 months later - cost me 2 grand.
          Two years ago - plasma screens = 6+ grand...now you can get them for 1500+
          • That's the point, I don't see anything new about this thing. I could put together a box to do much the same thing for a hell of a lot less, and it'd do it just as good (Though changing the channel would require remote desktop or some custom code)

  • It isn't a matter of getting TV.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:19PM (#10975695) Homepage Journal
    It's a matter of TV carrying what you want to watch. I want to watch TV (sports in particular) from other countries, but thanks to NTSC/PAL and a lack of willingness by fatcats at cable companies (who believe that's not what the public wants: Self full-filling prophecy) it's not on the menu or ever likely to be.

    Then there's still the sticky matter of not being allowed to watch a network station from outside the area your local affiliate owns.

    • I want to watch TV (sports in particular) from other countries, but thanks to NTSC/PAL and a lack of willingness by fatcats at cable companies (who believe that's not what the public wants: Self full-filling prophecy) it's not on the menu or ever likely to be.

      Get a DISH. They're always trying to get me to pay $45 to watch cricket from New Delhi, or extreme barfighting, or some other abomination. The content is there, if you're willing to pay for it.
    • You'd make fast friends with our Aussie buddy here who pines for the real sports (Rugby, but not Aussie Rules rugby I guess)
      • You'd make fast friends with our Aussie buddy here who pines for the real sports (Rugby, but not Aussie Rules rugby I guess)

        I sympathise. I watched the Rugby World Cup at the local pub (in Santa Cruz, CA) always a day or two after the actual matches. Had to fend of retard baseball fans and stuff, too!

  • Figures (Score:3, Interesting)

    by big_groo ( 237634 ) <groovis AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:19PM (#10975698) Homepage
    Can TV2Me be viewed on a Mac? Presently TV2Me can only be viewed through a Windows-based operating system.

    Why does this irk me so? Not that I'd actually spend 6500 bucks on this *anyway*...

    • Why does this irk me so? Not that I'd actually spend 6500 bucks on this *anyway*...

      Maybe on an economy of scale it could be done for much less?

    • [flame suit on...mac mods seem to like smacking me down]

      Because it reminds you that MacOS is still a very small part of the desktop computer market. Mac people are convinced that by buying a cool, hip computer, thery should have access to all the cool, hip stuff that comes along for computers. Especially if it involves video or graphics in any way.

      Not that I blame you. I'm new to Linux, and it bothers me everytime I want a cool app I've used un XP, only to find there's no linux version. Even worse with h

  • Requirements (Score:5, Funny)

    by RealProgrammer ( 723725 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:21PM (#10975729) Homepage Journal
    • Proprietary video card
    • Proprietary software
    • Desire to watch TV

    That last one would mean I'd have to avert my eyes from Slashdot, however briefly. I can't see that happening anytime soon.

    • The price is $4750US, you must have a REAL desire to watch TV. But it would be much cheaper just to connect netmeeting to your tv tuner card.

      How much bandwidth does this really need?
    • Sounds like all the necessary ingredients are present for a successful venture.
      • money
      • money
      • fool

  • name (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eyeball ( 17206 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:21PM (#10975730) Journal
    ...he eventually wants to make his technology as ubiquitous and as essential as TiVo is to some."

    "Dude, check out my new TV2Me."
    "We got our TV2Me bill."
    "I was watching TV2Me while waiting in the traffic jam."

    The name doesn't really work too well.

  • Bah (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This only serves to watch your local programming while being elsewhere. What I want is to be able to get TV from any country in the world (well, in reality where they broadcast in English, Spanish, or French).

  • Not high def? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:25PM (#10975780) Homepage
    A high-def mpeg2 stream requires about 20mbps ... anyone know how much a similar quality mpeg4 stream takes?
    • mpeg2 = 20mbps
      (mpeg2)/2 = (20mbps)/2
      mpeg = 10mbps

      mpeg4 = 4*10mbps
      mpeg4 = 40 mbps

      Correct me if I'm wrong... but I think the maths are right.

      (it's a joke kids, everybody chuckle a little... now go back to work.)
    • MPEG-4 is already obsolete. Apple says an HD H.264 stream fits in 6-8Mbps.
      • Apple says an HD H.264 stream fits in 6-8Mbps.

        I don't care what Apple has if I need to install Quicktime to view it.

    • Re:Not high def? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 )
      With a good XviD encode, considering this is TV res here (Can't remember the exact res, but about 320x240, or 320x480 if it's interlaced), I would imagine with a post processor that somewhere aroud 500 to 750 kbit MPEG-4 would provide the same quality as this guy's solution. And considering how he says that you need at least 384kbit upstream, but will do better with more (Read that as you need more to get his level of quality), it seems that his compression is no better than xvid. In fact, he probably took
      • In fact, he probably took somebody elses MPEG-4 codec that was either already streamable, or took something like XviD and made it streamable... which isn't that hard to do.

        Congratulations, you've just figured out for yourself what is already spelled-out in the /. story.
        • No, I haven't, did you bother reaing the /. story? Let me quote a section for you:

          It's basically MPEG-4, improved upon, that allows for what he calls 'best of class' streaming video over a normal broadband connection.

          I said he probably is using somebody elses codec without improving on it. I think my position that this device of his isn't special in any way is pretty clear.
          • I said he probably is using somebody elses codec without improving on it.

            You said he might have included streaming support in a previously non-streamable MPEG-4 codec. That would be an improvement.
  • Although his system consists of both the encoding/netcasting/streaming and the client piece of it... the end benefit might not be that everyone zings their cable from home to their office PC (wait a minute, THAT would be pretty cool).

    The technology/concept is the cool part regardless of price at this early proof of concept stage. A different implementation could be some sort of uber VOD (video on demand) system, like those old QWEST commercials.

    You could get *every* channel (hypothetically), and kinda do

  • Snapstream is similar (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rjelks ( 635588 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:42PM (#10975934) Homepage
    Snapstream's Beyond TV server is kind of like this. You can log on anywhere with an interenet connection and view live streams from your home PC's tv-tuner card. It will only stream mpeg2, but you can also access recorded shows (can encode in divx or whatever you want). The quality might not be as high, but it looks like a cheap alternative. There are other options for streaming Live TV from your home pc that I've been playing around with, but with Snapstream, you can change channels much easier from remote locations. It's not exactly the same, but you can get your local cable from remote locations. $100 vs. $6500??
    • If you're still around...what platform/software are you using to stream ATI's AIW over the internet?? I'm guessing with an ATI, you're not using a NIX. Anyway, I'm aware of ATI's bundled software that can share the EASYVIEW over a LAN, but what do you use over the internet? WMP encoder?

  • Seems like a scam to me, or at least a ripoff. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @01:43PM (#10975947)
    This "TV2Me" device is just a standard SFF PC with a TV tuner (http://spaceshift.net/images/pvs.jpg). And yet he charges 6500$ US for this.

    Is it just me, or could I put together a box with all the same hardware for under 500$ US?

    The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net. Is that feature really worth $6000 US? I mean, it's just a convienience to avoid using remote desktop to change the channel.

    So again, seems like either a scam or ripoff to me.
    • Most cable ISPs have an upload limit of 48KBps (384kbps) or thereabouts.

      To upload in realtime from your PC/TiVo/ReplayTV, you'd need about 1Mbps (DiVX ;-) quality). Clearly, not feasible the way broadband is structured.

      • Not even close. 1mbit good MPEG-4 video is near-DVD quality. As in, few artifacts at near-DVD res.

        TV, we're talking 320x240 or thereabouts. Half the macroblocks, it stands to reason that roughly half the bitrate would give similar quality.

        That said, the site claims that you should have MORE than 384kbit upstream to get good results. Half of 1mbit is 500kbit, and 500kbit is a bit more than 384kbit, so this is right in line with standard MPEG-4. Apply postprocessing on the decoding end and 500kbit would loo
    • Is it just me, or could I put together a box with all the same hardware for under 500$ US?

      But who's gonna compress it, Kid, you?

      (apologies to Han Solo)
      • Compress what? The video? Any standard free MPEG-4 encoder will do just as good a job as this guy's box, based on his stated bandwidth requirements.
        • Compress what? The video? Any standard free MPEG-4 encoder will do just as good a job as this guy's box, based on his stated bandwidth requirements.

          Which MPEG-4 profile will give you 640x480 broadcast quality at 384Kb/s? Post a link if you could - many of us would find that very useful.
          • Who said anything about 640x480? That's significantly above TV quality, which is 352x240 if I recall correctly. And you can get pretty close to broadcast quality at 384kbit at that resolution.

            Of course, that's assuming that you're discarding every other frame to do the deinterlacing. If you had a good motion compensated deinterlacer, you'd need a higher bitrate.

            Also, please note that his solution doesn't use 384kbit, that's only the lowest usable setting. The site says that you need more bandwidth than th
            • Who said anything about 640x480? That's significantly above TV quality, which is 352x240 if I recall correctly.

              No, NTSC is 525 lines vertical. Accounting for the vertical blanking interval and closed captioning you wind up with about 483 lines vertical. Apply a 4:3 aspect ratio, and most digital NTSC video work is done at 640x480. DVD's are encoded at 720x480.

              The site says that you need more bandwidth than that to get decent quality.

              Cringely says it looks like TV at 384.
              • Yes, as I said, that's with discarding every other field/frame for deinterlacing, which knocks that 483 (Let's call it 480 for simplicity) down to about 240.

                Of course, if you do good deinterlacing (I like motion compensated), you end up with that 480.

                Still, analog cable doesn't get you 640 horizontal resolution. And this device is dealing with only analog cable.

                You only get 640x480 AFTER you stretch the image to a 4:3 aspect ratio. But that's just the display res, there is no requirement to compress at t
              • As per my previous reply, I decided to post a sample image from the test I ran.

                First, an explanation. I compressed using single-pass encoding, since you can't do multipass on realtime content, and I wanted to be fair.

                The video source was 640x352, and was compressed at 352x480. Unmodified DivX postprocessing was enabled.

                The screenshot here you see is, on the left, the original, and on the right, the original stretched out to 640x480.

                My conclusions:

                1) The test would have been much better with higher qual
                • While I appreciate your taste in SciFi, that looks like VHS to me, not broadcast. Yeah, I have satellite.

                  I do note that there is alot of noise in your image. Noise is hard to compress - maybe that's what the preprocessing works out?
                  • Satellite, yes, but the solution in question here is designed for cable tv, it seems. So broadcasting cable-quality video over the internet is a lot easier than satellite quality.

                    If you think this looks like VHS, I'd love to have your VCR, I've never seen a recordable VHS tape that looked half this good :) To me, comparing to my analog cable (On a Sony Wega TV), the sample I provided looks a lot better.

                    It's possible... DivX also supports preprocessing, but I left it off.
    • The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net.

      Actually, the unique thing is that it can supposedly stream TV quality images over a much lower bandwidth connection (384kbs) than other systems. It uses a custom card for this. See this Cringely [pbs.org] article for another take on it.

      • I just compressed high quality content at 320x240 with 384kbit (to MPEG-4) There were very not really any visible artifacts. The guy here claims that his capture card is special not because he has special MPEG-4 (Indeed, he probably uses a standard MPEG-4 encoder chip), but instead some sort of special pre-processing he does. That can be done in software, it doesn't require a 6000$ card.

  • Great for homesick ex-pats (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jettoblack ( 683831 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @02:00PM (#10976108)
    I live in Japan and often thought of building a box like this to leave in my family's house in the US, so that I can watch my favorite TV programs from here. Fortunately, thanks to bittorrent, I can download all my shows faster and in much higher quality than I could stream live from a home broadband connection. But if there is a worldwide crackdown on BT/P2P/etc., I'll definitely consider doing it myself. Should be easily under $400 to build a box like this.
  • Snapstream's [snapstream.com] Beyond TV already allows you to do this with their software (as long as you have a software based TV tuner card). You can stream live, or recorded video over the net at a variety of qualities. I can use it to watch live TV from work at a medium bitrate, or stream high quality video over my network to any screen in the house.

  • What it does (Score:4, Informative)

    by gordguide ( 307383 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @02:30PM (#10976393)
    Some of the posters seem to be confused as to what, exactly this does. Now, they all seem to get the TV over IP part. Fine.

    You buy the box for $6,500.00 and stick it in your house. Then you go off somewhere, let's say a hotel 3,000 miles away, and log in to your stream.

    You don't lug the box around. It stays at home.

    You don't "get" the Manchester United game or Moscow TV, unless you already could get them. Reread last sentence. Twice.

    If you want to stream ESPN, you must already subscribe to ESPN at home. Reread that sentence, if necessary.

    You can stream the local, over-the-air channels you might be missing in whatever God-forsaken hotel room you might find yourself in, for free if they are free at your house. At home.

    You can stream the cable, satellite, or whatever you pay for and get at home.

    What you don't get:
    Any channel you can't get at home, now.
    Channels you don't pay for now, if they require you to pay at home.
    No, you can't say goodbye to the cable company, tear down the dish, or steal the world's broadcast signals unless you already do steal them.

    If you need the local news when you're in Bali, it's a workable solution. If you want 2,000 channels you can't get at home while you're in Bali, you still can't get them.

  • While the terrestrial broadcasters will scream "you're theifing our signal, you bastards," and DirecTV won't give you local channels for the same arguement, that's not the root cause.

    It threatens advertising revenue.

    Advertising is regional, and there's a strangle-hold on the broadcasters to keep it that way. The advertisers want to squeeze every last schekel out of the consumers, and they adjust market prices per the tolerance of each individual market. When the folks in LA (either one) can see the pr
    • The advertisers want to squeeze every last schekel out of the consumers, and they adjust market prices per the tolerance of each individual market.

      While this may be the case in very limited cases, it's not the overdriving factor. You're correct that it's drivin by advertising revenue, but it's the local affiliates which are getting the squeeze - they're the ones putting the stranglehold on the consumer. The advertisers don't give a flying F*#k, as long as they only pay for the audience they're getting.

  • Bah... I've been doing it for months. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sanermind ( 512885 ) on Thursday December 02, 2004 @03:49PM (#10977415)
    I'm in Denver, and don't have cable. However, my parents (in Cleveland), happen to subscribe to an uber-cable offering of just about everything available [over 300 channels]. We both have broadband as well. So, it was a simple matter to drop a $30 bttv card in the linux box working as a firewall at their house, and build an IR transmitter to control a dedicated cable decoder box. Mpeg4 at 512 kilobit is perfectly watchable, especially at 320x240 resolution. I recommend downloading ffmpeg [slashdot.org] if you are interested in doing the same.

  • Sony has a similar idea with LocationFree TV. You get an LCD that can get TV both wirelessly when you're at home, as well as streamed over the Internet when you're not.

    press release [sony.com]

    SonyStyle store [sonystyle.com]

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