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Follow UsIt's probably the only time 'KBC' has been viewed live in
Mexico. I was on the terrace of a penthouse suite in the elegant Marquis Reforma
hotel, nibbling on an enchilada, with a great view of a Mexico City morning, and
of Shahrukh Khan and Compaq-ji full-screen on my (IBM) notebook.
It was a long route for the program to travel: from a Tata Sky
connection at home in Delhi, out through my Airtel DSL broadband connection, to
Mexico, to the hotel's Wi-Fi, and my notebook. It wasn't smooth throughout,
but it worked, and what made it happen was a 'Hava box' installed at home.
The Hava is a box that lets you watch TV on a PC or laptop
anywhere. In the home-on your balcony, in bed, or wherever your Wi-Fi reaches-or
anywhere in the world that the Internet reaches. And it's designed and
developed in India.
There's a lot of product design happening in India, but
end-to-end product design with the IP owned by the Indian company and licensed
out to OEM customers, is still rare.
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| Designed in India by Monsoon Multimedia, the Hava box connects between your TV and its signal source (cable, or a set-top box), and links to your Wi-Fi router, wirelessly or by cable. You can then watch TV on a laptop or PC anywhere in the home on Wi-Fi -or from anywhere in the world, on the Internet. That's place-shifting. For time shifting, you can record the video, pause live TV, or go back a few minutes to review something. It's easy to set up: It took us 20 minutes to get it up and running, out of the box. An infra-red gadget and software lets you even change channels from the PC. HAVA streams video at 8 MBPS in MPEG2 at 720x480 pixels, and also supports MPEG4. You can view the (same) video channel on multiple PCs. Price: Rs 10,000 to 19,000. Cheaper variants skip the built-in Wi-Fi (you can still view video wirelessly through your existing Wi-Fi network) or TV tuner (not required anyway for use with a set-top box) |
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Hava is the creation of Monsoon Multimedia, a Noida-based
company that's done the hardware design, firmware, software, the central
server, and even the packaging and plastics. The boxes are made in Malaysia by a
Singapore-based contract manufacturer, and have been in production since July
2006.
Monsoon Multimedia was incorporated in India in 2004, and has
wholly-owned subsidiaries in the US and Russia (where it has some development).
Monsoon got a special award from Nasscom at its annual
Leadership Summit this year, in the product innovation category, which
recognized Hava as the world's first product that integrated video
time-shifting and place-shifting.
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| Arvind Jha (seated in chair) with his team at Monsoon Multimedia, Noida. The company also has subsidiaries in Russia (for development) and the USA |
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Monsoon gets royalty fees from OEM vendors it has licensed the
Hava box to. Pinnacle sells it as the 'PCTV To Go' for $249, mainly in US
and Europe stores, while Leadtek of Taiwan sells it in Asia-Pacific. Monsoon's
president Arvind Jha says he expects to sign over a dozen more such deals this
year. Pinnacle is due to launch it in India this month, for a stiff Rs 19,000.
Since last August, Monsoon has also been selling the Hava models through its
eStore, snappymultimedia.com, for between $129 and $299 for the various
models.
Up ahead, by end-2007: a product that lets you view TV anywhere-but
on a TV set, without a PC. An OEM variant would be embedded inside TV sets,
which could considerably increase the technology's reach-and Monsoon's
royalty revenues.
Prasanto K Roy
pkr@cybermedia.co.in