Twas only yesterday the lads in the Engadget mansion were lamenting about giving Skype a try if only it streamed some of that hot analog TV we've been hearing so much about. Little did we know that in some back alley of Akihabaraville, a team of hucksters from Novac in Japan were putting the finishing touches on their TV for Skype Anywhere (or something like that) product. Just load-up Skype and Novac's software onto your home PC, slip in their USB stick with integrated analog tuner, and voila, you're ready to stream the sweet, sweet TV out the Internet to any of the newer Skype clients capable of video calls. The TV will even call
you and then allow you to change channels via a chat window if we're reading the machine translation correctly -- enter "the ##12#" to switch to channel 12, for example. Not likely to give
Slingboxers any competition in terms of functionality or quality, but for ¥9,800 or about $85, you're not likely to find a cheaper solution boxed up so neatly. Oh Skype, come 'er and give us a cuddle.
[Via
Impress]
posted July 7th 2006 9:33AM
Are you sure it's analog? DVB-T is a big standard in Japan so I would have figured it'd be digital (a lot of channels are even in HD). Perhaps they couldn't find a way to handle all of that bandwidth though.
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.novac.co.jp%2Frelease%2F2006%2Frelease060707_2.html&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
TV over telephony over IP. Sweet. Pointlessly so.
With a few feature additions, this could become a serious competition to Sling -- even if the new features brought it up in price near the Slingbox, the fact that you don't need proprietary software to view it could be a real plus. An internet cafe is a lot more likely to have Skype than the Sling client!
Doko demo terebi yatta!
Dangit! I was in Akihabara yesterday, how did I miss this ??? Ah well...I got my usb access point locator and a book/DVD on erotic massage...I suppose those will keep me entertained until I hit Tokyo again in August...
But it WOULD be cool to watch the Simpsons live (at some ungodly hour of the morning no doubt) via one of these things...
Would like to purchase this Novac gizmo however when I enter there site it makes no allowance for English. Does anyone know where I can purchase?
Guys....just paste the URL into Google and it will ask if you'd like the page translated....
There is a link at the top of the page that is listed as "inquiry". This is their contact info.