The personal video recorder is one of the most successful and frequently used components of audio/video gear that we install in our client’s homes. In fact, most of our clients have several recorders – one in the main family room and one in a home theater area and/or master bedroom. These personal video recorders allow our busy clients to watch their favorite shows when they want to watch them anywhere in the home where we have installed these recorders. But what if they want to watch these home recorded shows away from their home – let’s say from their laptop in the comfort of a hotel room with a high speed internet connection?
Such a solution is now possible thanks to a series of technical innovations in the streaming of MPEG4 compressed video. Sony (with their product called LocationFree, see www.sony.com/locationfree) and SlingMedia (www.slingmedia.com) have introduced products this year that are capable of encoding and compressing the audio/video signals coming from the back of a standard definition personal video recorder and stream them to the home’s router. From there they can be received by a Windows PC client attached anywhere in the world on an Internet broadband connection.
The products work like this:
Your client has just checked into their hotel room with high-speed internet access. He/she connects the laptop to the Internet, checks email, and then decides to watch the 60 Minutes episode recorded at home. With the Sony product (for example) they launch a software application called LocationFree. The LocationFree software asks them if they are home or away (the laptop could also be used to capture the streaming 60 Minutes video stream at home). Clicking on the away mode starts the process of connecting the laptop to the client’s home router via a DDNS service that Sony provides. (This DDNS service ensures that the client can always find and connect to their home router even if their home internet service provider dynamically changes the IP address of the home router.)
Once the router connection is established the video stream from the home’s personal recorder starts to play in a window that opens on the laptop. You can even control the video recorder because the client software has IR codes built into the software that emulate the IR codes of the personal video recorder remote. Clicking on the Guide button on the laptop screen issues an IR command sent from the hotel room laptop to their home router and then from the router to the Sony LocationFree BaseStation where the IR code is blasted to the personal video recorder to show the Guide. Very cool!
A real life example
I was at my son’s soccer tournament last month and between games I drove my car with my wireless laptop around the local neighborhood looking for someone’s unprotected wireless access point (this took about a minute – there are so many unprotected wireless access points these days – but that’s the subject of another column!). Once connected to the Internet I launched my Sony LocationFree software and I was able to watch a Davis Cup tennis match on my laptop that I had recorded at home. With a hotdog in one hand and my Davis Cup tennis match playing on my laptop in the other hand – I was in my element! (Another option would have been to launch the Slingbox application on my Apple iPhone via a 3G wireless connection.)
Marrying the convenience of personal video recording with the flexibility of watching your content anywhere in the world is a very appealing technology. Both the Sony LocationFree and the SlingMedia products allow you to do this but before you run off and sell these products to all of your clients you should be aware of the following limitations:
• Your client must have a broadband upload bandwidth of at least 300Kbps from their home. This is the minimum bandwidth requirement to upload video from the home to the remote laptop. When the available bandwidth falls below this level the video transmission becomes unacceptably poor or doesn’t work at all. You can check your client’s upload speed by using speed tools found on a number of websites (like www.dslreports.com). The important concept to understand here is that, in the future, the upload speed of residential high-speed internet access may become as important as download speed. Currently we live in a world most of the digital content we want to have inside our home is located outside the home so download speeds are a priority. Soon, we will want the content that we have inside our home to be available to us anywhere we are and that will place a much higher priority on upload speeds. For this reason, if your client can afford it (and if it’s available), I recommend high-speed residential broadband synchronous services.
• Only one laptop can access your media content at a time. You can purchase multiple client licenses but the streaming video is limited to one client device at a time.
• If you take over the control of the home personal video recorder from your hotel room you should make sure that no one at your home is watching that video recorder at the same time – unless they want to watch what you are watching!
Place shifting of personal video recording is just emerging as a very exciting new product category. To be honest, these new products are still in their infancy and these first generation products don’t always have the image quality and low latency that we would prefer for audio/video enjoyment and control. But over the next few years we will continue to see better audio/video compression algorithms, better encoding and decoding chipsets and faster Internet bandwidth offerings. It’s only a matter of time before placeshifting of personal video recordings becomes as popular as the time-shifting feature is today. If you want to experience this new technology trend first hand I recommend you spend the $300 to $400 to buy the SlingMedia or Sony products – it’s just one more product that leverages and enhances the value of your connected digital home.
(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)
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