The Hindu : National : Wireless way to take your TV with you

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Dec 31, 2006
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National

Wireless way to take your TV with you

Anand Parthasarathy

Noida firm's `place-shifting' technology, fuels favourite holiday gadget in U.S.

— Photo: Special Arrangement

THUMBS UP: Monsoon Media's president Arvind Jha (seated front) with the team that created the first wireless video streaming solution for anywhere, anytime TV.

Bangalore: Some people like to set their own infotainment agenda. They like to decide when and where they want to watch their favourite TV programmes - and do not want to be slaves of the networks or the cable-wallah. This has created what is being seen at the year-end as one of the biggest waves of consumer-driven technology worldwide: the idea of the place-shifting, time-shifting TV.

And fuelling this `garam hava' in places as far apart as the U.S. and Canada; Taiwan and Korea and Australia and New Zealand, is a product called (what else!) ``Hava,'' created by a couple of dozen engineers in the laboratories of Monsoon Multimedia at Noida near Delhi.

Hava takes video content from your television set (or any other source such as a DVD player) and sends it to multiple PCs or monitors in the house - or even remotely to anywhere in the world through an Internet connection. Users can control the content at any location, exactly as they would do with the remote, in front of their main TV.

Interestingly, the first-ever device to do this - the Slingbox, launched just one year ago — was also the product of Bangalore-based Indian brains at Sling Media. What Hava does is to untether the technology so that it is completely wireless and can be viewed on any Wi-Fi-enabled device.

In another step forward, it allows multiple users to view content simultaneously. And in a canny move, it is tightly integrated with Microsoft's Windows XP Multimedia Centre Edition (MCE), which allows it to leverage all functions of that version including digital video-recording and replaying later.

In a special briefing for The Hindu , Monsoon Multimedia president Arvind Jha said the company, in addition to selling it directly to customers in the U.S. and Canada, licensed the technology to Pinnacle, which is offering the device under its brand name PCTV ToGo in 15,000 stores worldwide, and to LeadTek, which is marketing it in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

It is sold under the Aeris brand in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. For every piece sold (at $249), the Indian inventors earn a royalty of around $10.

The company expects to see a quarter million units sold by the end of 2008..

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