Digital Home Thoughts: Sage TV Adds Placeshifting

"SageTV Media Center today becomes the first full- featured personal video recorder/media center software product to offer placeshifting capabilities enabling users to access their live or recorded TV, music and photos on any PC when they are away from home. The integration of PVR and placeshifting functionality in a single system yields better video quality and faster navigation than a separate placeshifting box connected to a PVR while also costing significantly less than purchasing two separate solutions. The new placeshifting functionality is available immediately as a $30 add-on to both the Windows and Linux OEM editions of just-released SageTV Media Center Version 5.0. “Placeshifting lets you enjoy your personal digital media library anywhere in the world, and combining PVR and placeshifting capabilities solves the performance, complexity and cost problems created by standalone placeshifting solutions,” said Mike Machado, CEO of Sage TV. “You don’t need an extra piece of hardware on your network, you don’t need to pay monthly subscription fees for a PVR service, you avoid the losses in video quality caused by having to rerecord the recorded video, and you don’t have to wait while the box sends IR commands to a PVR, records the TV signal and sends it for decoding.”"

With this release Sage TV has managed to leap past Media Center Edition in terms of offering a built-in solution for the problem of placeshifting. Sure, there's Orb for the MCE platform, but it's extra software that you need to install, which is something I'm trying desperately to avoid in my MCE machine. I had to reformat it a couple of months ago because it became unstable from third party software/codecs I had been installing on it. Any Sage TV users out there? If I wasn't using MCE I'd likely be using SnapStream's BeyondTV - in many ways, it's still superior to MCE, which is sad given Microsoft's resources. The C|NET blog has a bit more details on how this new software works.