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Viewing report
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Bending the Rules of Time and Space: Trends and Analysis of Place Shifted Media
The Diffusion Group, Jan 2008, Pages: 65
Today’s consumers demand more than just varied content. They want it on their terms, on their schedules. Remember your first VCR and the worlds it opened? Get ready for the next radical notion. Unshackling your TV from the living room, you are now able to transport your media to where and when you want it. In other words, place shifting enables the transport of one’s media to whichever corner of the globe one may happen to be.
In theory, 'place-shifting' does for location what 'time-shifting' has done for scheduling. Placeshifting can be defined as watching or listening to live, recorded or stored media on a remote device via the internet or over a data network.
Consumers are already struggling to make sense of the standard array of programmed media available to them today; now add to this the tsunami of Internet-based content, PVR-stored content, and on-demand content and one can imagine the sense of confusion that ordinary consumers will encounter. Great, I’ve got 3,000 'channels' - now how do I make sense of all this? Since PS allows consumers to be entertained during other 'wasted' time the author believes it could herald an expansion of consumer entertainment time.
This report evaluates the key technologies that are currently enabling place shifting; examines the market dynamics shaping its evolution; estimates platform market shares and revenues for the various solutions; and examines key vendors currently offering PS solutions. The report also considers the potential legal and regulatory pitfalls that may confront these companies as they traverse the new opportunities and challenges offered by this dynamic market.
Key Findings:
- Though place shifting may well prove to be a compelling application, it will not be capable of acting as a stand-alone revenue driver or support an independent hardware platform.
- Content rights holders will begin to assert their rights as usage of PS technology become widespread. In particular, the challenges made with respect to the physical location in which content is consumed rather than in actual streaming of the content will prove a pivotal issue. Sports rights holders, in particular, will demand that blackout areas be enforced and studios will demand that regional release windows be respected. The author does not expect challenges to be made to the consumers’ use of PS technology for the private enjoyment of legally obtained material, but the crossover between business and consumer interests is no doubt set to clash.
- By 2012, the author predicts that there will be 95 million active, configured place shifting servers in broadband households around the world. The most frequently used device for this function will be the PC (with 48 million PS servers) followed by game consoles (with nearly 23 million units), hybrid IP/digital TV set-top boxes (with 13.6 million units), and digital media adapters (with 8.7 million units).
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