Placeshifting: Remote Viewing of Home Media

New "placeshifting" products at CES 2005 enable viewers to remotely access home media over the Internet. We wrote about Orb Networks (at left) before the show: an $80 per year subscription buys a gateway to your Windows XP Media Center PC over the Internet from any multimedia-capable device. Sling Media's $249 SlingBox (top right), a favorite at the show, streams your cable/satellite/PVR content to your Windows XP laptop to wherever you are on the Net. And a base station for the Sony's Location-Free TV set (lower right) plugs into your broadcast box as well as the Internet (but apparently not your home network)  and transmits content wirelessly over your household WiFi network.

Sony's WiFi TV receivers let you carry your screen (available in an $1,100-7 inch and a $1,500-12 inch version) around your house and out into the yard, although you may need  next generation WiFi 802.11n for the best range. More interestingly, you should be able to bring the TV into a WiFi Starbucks on the road and tune into your local channels.

Similar to the Orb and Sling products, Sony is planning to offer client software that can access the Location-Free base station from any laptop over the Internet. Placeshifting your home TV content to a laptop or even a handheld device solves one of the big problems of pervasive TV: who gets paid for the content. These products simply make your home TV cable or satellite subscription portable, and they only allow one remote viewer per household. They don't require complex digital rights arrangements, although there will be some minor leakage, for example, when users remotely access locally blacked out sporting events.

Instead of waiting around for traditional broadcasters to start streaming high quality content over the wired and wireless Internet, placeshifting is a bottom-up cyberstyle approach in which individuals zap their paid-for pay TV programming from their home sets. Of course, if everybody watched TV programs through a remote placeshifter, the Internet would grind to a halt. There's not enough wireline bandwidth let alone wireless capacity to re-transmit everything. And compared to a big plasma HDTV in the living room, streaming media over the Internet generally looks like hell. Nevertheless, TV pervades.

UPDATE: Describing this with a web developer, I realized that most home broadband connections are asynchronous: the download speed from the Internet is much faster than the upload speed to the Internet, like 1.5Mbps down/250Kbps up. Anyone placeshifting their home media would be using the slower speed, which might be enough for a small handheld screen but wouldn't look that good on a laptop.