Moving to Cut TV’s Ties to the Living Room Set

Joe Harris doesn’t watch TV the way most people do, but his geeky approach may not seem odd for long.

Consider what he did last September as the seesaw U.S. Open tennis tournament semifinal between Jennifer Capriati and Elena Dementieva entered the decisive third set.

He was in a bar at San Diego International Airport, and his airline announced that his flight was about to board. Most people would have paid their tabs, trudged off and missed Dementieva’s victory. Harris took out his palm-sized electronic organizer at the gate, logged into a wireless Internet service and tapped into the cable TV feed at his Portland, Ore., home.

As the line of people slowly filed onto the plane, he watched the rest of the match on his organizer’s small color screen.

“It was beautiful,” he said, “and crisp.”

Harris’ feat wasn’t so remarkable, considering that he’s a vice president at Orb Networks, which is trying to build a business around this new version of must-see TV. But pretty soon, ordinary people might be able to do the unconventional.

Orb and its competitors, including tiny start-ups such as Sling Media Inc. and giants such as Sony Corp. and Microsoft Corp., are enabling customers to move the shows they love off their TV sets and onto hand-held computers, cellphones and other gadgets.

These companies are betting that TV aficionados want to take their favorite programs on the road, just as millions of people are starting to tote their music collections on iPods and other portable devices.

Unleashing TV from its living room moorings is the latest effort in a broader movement to cut the ties between entertainment and devices. With music, movies, TV and radio all being translated into the ones and zeros of digital data, people no longer need dedicated devices to handle different types of entertainment. Digital audio and video is also easier to copy, store and move.

“Being able to get to your digital content anywhere, anytime, is really where it’s all headed,” said Mike McCoy, president of ADS Technologies Inc., whose products include TV tuners for PCs.

Orb Networks, Sling Media and their competitors may run into the same entertainment industry roadblocks that confronted previous boundary-stretching technologies, such as personal video recorders, MP3 players and VCRs.

“We’re not against all forms of remote access,” said Brad Hunt, chief technology officer of the Motion Picture Assn. of America. But, Hunt said, the MPAA wants to ensure that technology does not circumvent copyrights or threaten the entertainment industry’s business models.

Among the MPAA concerns: Undermining local advertisers who support free over-the-air TV, and enabling people to use a single cable TV or satellite subscription to feed more than one home.

That’s why the studios’ trade association is talking to anti- piracy companies about “controlled remote access” approaches, Hunt said. “We are working together to define how to do this in a way that is not disruptive to the existing business of content distribution, including very important free-to-air broadcast television.”

For many entertainment industry executives, the idea of audio and video files moving freely from place to place conjures up scary images of rampant online piracy. Nevertheless, the music industry is starting to adapt to the new era of extreme portability, licensing their catalogs to companies that pump music through the digital ether to PCs, iPods and car stereos.

For other forms of entertainment, crucial pieces are starting to come together. These include high-speed Internet connections in homes and public spaces, online services that offer digital programming, and home networks that can move audio and video files from room to room.

According to the technology research firm Parks Associates, more than 30% of all U.S. households had high-speed Internet connection by the end of last year, and more than 15% had home networks. Meanwhile, more than 13,000 restaurants, hotels, airports and open spaces offer high-speed Internet services that the public can connect to wirelessly.

Some analysts and industry executives say significant hurdles remain to be overcome. Many wireless home networks don’t have enough capacity to handle digital TV programs. Home networking gear isn’t as easy to set up and use as a toaster. And Hollywood studios are putting anti-piracy controls on digital movie files, severely restricting how they can be used.

Nor is it clear how many people really want to ship entertainment to and fro digitally.

A year and a half ago, SMC Networks Inc. of Irvine started selling its first home-entertainment-networking device: a $250 set-top box that brought digital pictures, music and video from a PC to a TV set and stereo. But its price and limitations caused demand to fizzle, said Tony Stramandinoli, SMC’s marketing director.

“Everyone talks about moving content from the PC to the TV. There’s a lot of hype about it,” he said. “We didn’t get rich off of it. No one got rich off of those products at that point.”

Still, Stramandinoli said this year’s less expensive models should fare much better. He’s particularly bullish on devices that enable things trapped on a PC, such as a downloaded movie, to escape to the living room.

So is Bruce Eisen, executive vice president of CinemaNow Inc. in Marina del Rey, which delivers movies for rent through the Internet. Eisen said several companies would unveil entertainment-networking devices at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, which opens today in Las Vegas.

“In ’04 everybody did music, and we think ’05 is the year video has its turn,” Eisen said. “All the consumer electronics companies and many of the computer companies are coming out with different devices to take video off the PC and put CinemaNow front and center on the living room television.”

Union City, Calif.-based Orb Networks wants to go one step further. For about $10 a month, Orb subscribers will be able to tap into the TV shows they get at home from any device with an Internet connection, anywhere.

One prerequisite for using the service is having a computer at home that’s equipped with a TV tuner and connected to cable TV, a satellite receiver or an antenna. Another requirement is that the computer be left on and connected at high speed to the Internet. The final ingredient is Orb’s software, which enables the computer to transmit live or recorded TV shows through the Net.

Once they have those pieces in place, customers can turn any laptop, electronic organizer or cellphone with a Web browser and media-playing software into an extension of their TV. They simply connect to the Internet and log into the Orb website, which provides a secure link to their home computer’s TV tuner and recorded shows.

For example, someone sitting at an Internet-enabled McDonald’s could use a laptop to watch last night’s “Law & Order” or tune into a live local news show. The same could be done with music, movies and photos stored on the home PC.

Sling Media takes a somewhat more conventional approach -- it doesn’t rely on home computers and it doesn’t charge a monthly fee. The San Mateo, Calif.-based start-up sells a $249 box that connects to the customer’s cable or satellite set-top box or digital video recorder. The box converts analog TV signals to digital and squeezes them into a format that can be streamed over the Net. Laptops, cellphones or organizers running Sling Media’s software can fetch the shows from the “SlingBox” via the Internet.

Alviso, Calif.-based TiVo Inc., maker of a leading personal video recorder, is taking a third approach to unleashing TV programs -- in alliance with its former rival, Microsoft.

The companies jointly developed technology that can transfer recorded TV programs through a home network from a late-model TiVo to a computer running Microsoft’s Windows XP. That computer, in turn, can transfer the programs to specially equipped portable video players.

“You can set it up so you have a pipeline that keeps filling,” making sure that new programs are regularly loaded onto the portables, said James Bernard, product manager for Microsoft’s Portable Media Center unit.

Relatively few people tote the kind of portable digital video player that Microsoft has in mind, but there are millions of people with cellphones capable of playing video from the Internet -- about 10 million, according to Orb publicist Jennifer Reynolds. She added that a sizable chunk of the people who have tested Orb have used those tiny screens to tune in TV.