(First published two years ago)

My 3yr old son walked into my study hearing the radio. He looked at the computer monitor with a puzzled expression and said “that’s not the picture, that’s your email”. He kept scanning the room – I realized that he was looking for a TV picture to match Garrison Keilor’s voice. He was born in the 21st century and will never know a time without TV, internet or on-demand content. I explained to him that radio was TV without a picture – he reluctantly accepted that. From a simple radio more than sixty years ago we are in the information age where “place shifting” is the latest buzzword.

Place shifting evolved from another buzzword “time shifting”. Time shifting refers to being able to record content and watch/listen to it later. Place shifting refers to being able to watch/listen to it later from a different location or place. The VCR was the earliest form for time-shifting for video content, however programming the VCR was best left to folks with multiple doctoral degrees. The TV Guide in the early nineties was a multi-billion dollar business and consisted of a half-an-inch thick book with program listings. If you could navigate the TV Guide and program the VCR to record the programs you wanted – you may have achieved time shifting. Then came along VideoGuide (yours truly had a small role there) that put the entire TV Guide on you TV screen in an interactive manner and you could navigate that with your remote and select a program to record. This was a big leap forward. More than ten years later, it is still the preferred user interface on a TV. The VideoGuide was primitive in that it interfaced your clunky VCR to the TV and you had to have blank tapes in the VCR to record. The arrival of hard disk based TIVO heralded true time-shifting. Of course, TIVO turned selling TV programming into a recurring revenue business, but with free services such as MeeVee.com it may have to find other revenue sources. There are several Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) standalone (sony, toshiba, JVC) and PC based solutions (Hauppauge) that provide TiVo like timeshifting today.

With the launch of Tivo-to-go, arrival of products like Slingbox and ORB networks, place shifting technology is commercially available at fairly reasonable price. As the cost per terabyte and cost per Mbit of bandwidth fall steadily, place-shifting becomes economically viable and possible. This means that if you have an internet ready mobile device you can watch your recorded Baseball game from anywhere by streaming it to your device. Of course, you can also do it from another browser enabled computer from your vacation home. This one approach – another is that of a portable media center (PMC) offered by companies such as iRiver, Archos and Lyra. These solutions can store as much as 400 hours of video (at the high end) and of course much more music and are portable. These solutions essentially claim that you can carry all your videos (I can’t think of more than twenty movies I would to like watch) – currently about 100+movies on a small device and watch them anytime, anywhere. Some of these devices support wireless connectivity as well as well as video capture – a Digital video recorder (DVR) – function.

These technologies are at their infancy today but soon will become ubiquitous and I believe that the next generation will not know a time when they could not access any content from any where. There are several technology pieces that need to get better and some gaps need to be filled before this happens. There are still opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate.

To access content from a mobile device, you need a device that can support the memory requirements for video and a network that provides a decent bandwidth. All the major mobile service providers are rolling out their high speed networks and we are a couple or more years away from high quality streaming video. In the near term there are opportunities to develop mobile optimized Codecs – most of the current codecs are based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression techniques that are standardized through formats such as MPEG.- 1 & 2.Research, both private and university, is now underway to leverage Fractal and Wavelet compression techniques to improve video compression and of course that’s another billion dollar opportunity awaiting an entrepreneur.

Video indexing will help us find and watch relevant content – the TV guide can be considered to be an early form of video indexing. Google Video, Yahoo Video have started indexing video. Indexing is primitive and innovation is required to help locate that specific “home run” or scene from a movie to be located and streamed on-demand.Future video transmission standards such as MPEG-7 are expected to support granular indexing. This of course means conversion of 40 plus years of video into a new standard – with indexing (probably manually done). Could this be an outsourcing opportunity down the road?

All the buzzwords aside, as consumers we want to record and store any content that we like, find & retrieve specific content from any device we own and from any place. We also want to manage the content, share it and edit it. I would safely estimate that we are about 2 years away at the minimum but not more than five years when these devices are as ubiquitous as an Ipod. Until such time place shifting in my home refers to the sofa cushions miraculously arranged into a space ship twenty feet from their previously known location and piloted by a power ranger.