Sony Goes Prime-Time With "LocationFree TV"

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-03-31T203300Z_01_T203793_RTRUKOC_0_US-COLUMN-PLUGGEDIN.xml' target='_blank'>http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyid=2006-03-31T203300Z_01_T203793_RTRUKOC_0_US-COLUMN-PLUGGEDIN.xml</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Sony's dream of freeing TV from the confines of the living room is looking more like reality with a gadget that allows you to watch local broadcasts on a PC even if you are thousands of miles from home. Imagine checking out your local news channel during an international flight or enjoying your favorite baseball team live while on a business trip in Dubai. Sony Corp. is notching up strong sales of a small black box that can do just that, providing that the airplane is Wi-Fi enabled and your hotel in Dubai has a broadband connection. The book-sized device plugs into your home TV antenna, converts the signal to the MPEG-4 digital standard, encrypts it for security and streams it over the Internet to your PC."</i><br /><br />According to the article, Sony's new LocationFree Base Station, which retails for about 32,000 yen ($272.70) in Japan, including proprietary software, seems to have struck a sweet spot. I have been dreading and looking forward to Location-free TV. I watch more that enough TV already and if it were available everywhere, I think that would be the end of my brain cells. :-)

[Phronetix]

Sony is a company that I find hard to figure. Their ingenuity and ability to manufacture quality products seems always to be offset by their inability to market their products (as well as I'd expect) to the non-Japanese
markets, and by the fact they try to make everything short of fur coats and salt licks.

Everytime I see their name on a product launch I cringe. My experience with their PDA's totally killed their rep in my mind. From giving them outragiously stupid names like Clié and PEG-[insert random six digit mix of numbers and letters here], to their inability to maintain the same handheld on the market for longer than a half season, to working with third party vendors to release accessories that could last more than 18 hours on the go... sigh.

Location free TV you say? My 2000 dollar couch so does not like how that sounds.

Dennis

ps: sorry about the rant, folks. I can delete the post if you like, Ed.'s




In other news...

To coincide with this launch, Sony has released the next generation of flash memory, the Memory Stick Ultra Universal Duo II neXt-stick. The MSUUD-II-neXtSTICK will be released in 1 and 2 GB formats, for only twice the current Memory Stick duo price.

Sony Home Entertainment has also elected to throw its support fully behind the MSUUD-II format, with all Sony Home Entertainment titles available in this format by 2Q 2007, when the 4 and 8 GB capacities will be released.

Sony also formally dropped its support of the Memory Stick and UMD formats, and will be relaunching its camera, audio, TV, and PSP product lines in the coming weeks to reflect this new commitment to the MSUUD-II format.

[Chris Gohlke]

Or you could get a SlingBox. The only advantage I saw to the Sony player is that there is already a client for the PSP.