[Swprograms] I Want My Moscow TV

[Joel Rubin <jmrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/technology/circuits/02inve.html

Dec. 2, 2004
By SETH SCHIESEL

KEN SCHAFFER doesn't like blind spots. Never has.

On Oct. 19, 1957, days after Sputnik became Earth's first manmade
satellite, Mr. Schaffer, the son of a Bronx truck driver, received a
Heathkit radio for his 10th birthday. Inspired by the chirping from
space, he soon became a world-class ham-radio operator, adept at Morse
code.

"It was compelling that I could just go beep-beep-beep, the smallest
possible muscle group movement, and I could send a signal that goes to
China," he recalled recently. "I would never answer people from New
Jersey or Long Island or anything. I wanted Mongolia."

Years later, in 1981, after detouring to invent a wireless microphone,
travel with the Rolling Stones and make guitars for John Lennon, Mr.
Schaffer installed a satellite dish atop his Midtown Manhattan
apartment building and was soon pulling in broadcasts from the Soviet
Union.

"I wasn't interested in HBO and free Showtime," he said. "It was not
interesting to me. I was watching Russian feeds from Moscow to Cuba -
and what they used to do after they finished the feed is, the Russians
would send porno to Havana, or American films. And this was before
Gorbachev and all that kind of stuff."

Inspired by the potential of satellites to open up communication, Mr.
Schaffer soon built a satellite telephone operation connecting the
Soviet Union with the West, a venture that he sold for millions in
1995.

Now, Mr. Schaffer, 57, is trying to abolish yet another blind spot. In
short, he has devised a way to make home TV reception portable - with
high-quality pictures to be watched, and channels to be changed, from
anywhere in the world that the Internet can reach.

So far, he has put his PC-based innovation into the hands of a few
dozen others willing to pay several thousand dollars. But he aims to
reduce the price to less than $1,000 within a year.

"Kenny is not your everyday eccentric," said Jonathan Sanders, a
consultant to CBS News in Moscow who has known Mr. Schaffer for more
than 20 years. "Kenny is an explosion of genius wrapped in a very
unconventional package that is bursting with energy. This is somebody
who is doing the kinds of things that you read about at one time only
in science fiction, things that no one else thinks are possible but
that he is able to pull off."

So much was clear one Tuesday afternoon last month.

"So this is like the Russian version of a cross between 'E.R.' and
'Law and Order,' " Mr. Schaffer said. He was sitting at a desk in the
apartment next to the Plaza Hotel where he has lived, at least part
time, since 1968. Spread before him were computer monitors. On one was
a live cable television feed from the apartment he keeps in Moscow. On
another, a live London feed was displaying a somewhat risqué
commercial for a British cellphone carrier.

The quality of the full-screen images bore no resemblance to what the
rest of the world thinks of as streaming Internet video. It was not
quite real television, but there was very little of the pixilation and
none of the incessant stuttering familiar to anyone who has watched
live video over the Internet. The main character appeared on the
Russian medical drama, and Mr. Schaffer jerked back a bit. "Arrgh!
That's my ex-wife!" he said, pointing at the actress, Alla Kliouka.

Mr. Schaffer popped out of full-screen mode, clicked, and switched the
channel to MTV Russia.

In fact, Mr. Schaffer was controlling a dedicated computer terminal
back in Moscow that was simultaneously connected to his Moscow cable
box and a D.S.L. data line. The terminal, which Mr. Schaffer calls
TV2Me, uses a small infrared emitter to tell the cable box which
channel to display. Inside TV2Me are special computer cards that allow
the unit to send high-quality video over a routine broadband data
connection.

In his bedroom is a huge Sony plasma flat-panel television. He puts up
the same Moscow channels that were on the laptop in the living room.
Even on the big screen, the images are fluid and clear.

It was an impressive demonstration, but a somewhat ironic one as well.
Sony, it turns out, has just developed a similar product, called
LocationFree TV. Both TV2Me and LocationFree TV allow a user to view
their home television from anywhere in the world that has a high-speed
Internet link, even a Wi-Fi connection outdoors. The Sony unit is
cheaper. The home base station of the Sony unit is smaller. Sony's
user interface is slicker. But for all that, Mr. Schaffer's unit
transmits a clearer picture over the Internet.

So how did he do it? And why?

Mr. Schaffer has always been a TV guy, and a stickler for picture
quality.

"We had one of the first televisions in the Bronx," he recalled. "I
remember vividly standing in the living room in front of this
round-tube TV thing, this huge console, watching the first
transmission of 'The Huntley-Brinkley Report' in color and screaming
to my mother, 'I can see the colors, I can see the colors!' "

In 1975, Mr. Schaffer bought one of the first big-screen projection
televisions in New York City, an 84-inch monster made by Advent. He
had been working as a rock music technician and publicist, and Mr.
Schaffer said that Ron Wood and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones
would sometimes come over to review concert tapes on the big screen.

Also that year, Mr. Schaffer was living with the band's tour director
when he noticed that whenever Mick Jagger would switch to a wireless
microphone, the sound quality collapsed. "Sometimes the police radio
would bleed through and it would be, 'There's a body floating in the
East River' or something, in the middle of a show," Mr. Schaffer said.

Mr. Schaffer set about inventing a wireless microphone that would
actually work well and came up with a system that lent itself to a
wireless guitar as well. His customers ended up including not only the
Stones and John Lennon, but also Pink Floyd, Peter Frampton, Fleetwood
Mac and others.

Two decades later, after Mr. Schaffer's venture into satellite phone
service - an endeavor that brought him a 14,000-word profile in The
New Yorker - he started playing around with Internet and Web systems.
He took a look at what was being called Web video and was not
impressed. "I saw what was presented as Internet TV on Yahoo," he
recalled. "It was the equivalent of the microphone Mick Jagger was
using when I said I could do better than that. It's a one-to-one
equivalent."

All the while, Mr. Schaffer was shuttling between New York and Moscow,
where he estimates that he has spent a total of perhaps four years out
of the last 20. Russian television improved through the 1990's, but he
still could not get what he wanted. "I missed 'Seinfeld,' " he said.
"I wanted to watch Ted Koppel and 'The Sopranos' and 'Saturday Night
Live.' "

He started working on TV2Me in earnest in 2001, and he has ended up
using the same basic compression technology that Sony is using, called
MPEG-4. But while Sony is essentially using standard MPEG-4 by itself,
Mr. Schaffer and his team of Turkish and Russian programmers have
developed circuitry that allows the MPEG-4 encoder to operate more
efficiently and to generate a better picture.

"All of his projects have to do with connecting people and also
something beyond the norm," said Robert E. Bishop, an old friend of
Mr. Schaffer's and a managing partner of Tekseed L.L.C., which is
developing a separate video system for security applications. "For
him, it has to be something that is advancing technology. I think he
was trying to take existing hardware and put it together in a way that
really improved the science of moving video from Point A to Point B."

The engineering has always come naturally to Mr. Schaffer. The
business side is another matter. He built a big business out of the
wireless music technology in the 1970's, but never patented his
inventions. He sold his satellite company for millions to a company
now part of the military contractor Lockheed Martin, but he lost much
of the proceeds in bad investments during the 1990's technology boom.

This time, Mr. Schaffer is trying to play by the book, a change he
attributes to an enhanced sense of responsibility after having a child
with Ms. Kliouka in 1995. He has patents pending. He has lawyers.

For now, he has sold only a few dozen TV2Me units, at prices ranging
from $4,800 to more than $6,000. Many of his clients so far are
well-heeled sports fanatics who simply must get their games when on
the road. One client is a University of Oklahoma football fan.
Another, a British rock star, needs his soccer.

Within a year, Mr. Schaffer hopes to reduce the price to less than
$1,000. Right now, the product is based on a high-powered Pentium 4 PC
running Windows, but by building special chips that can focus on only
the tasks required for TV2Me, such a product can be made lighter,
smaller and cheaper. The use of such chips is a big reason Sony's
product is so much less expensive than TV2Me.

In fact, Mr. Schaffer says he may end up selling his entire
technology. "I'd like to see this go to a company," he said,
indicating that he already has buyers in mind. Mr. Schaffer is keenly
aware of the copyright and other legal issues potentially posed by his
technology, which does, after all, retransmit cable or satellite
television signals over the Internet. He insists that each customer
put his systems only to personal use.

"I want to stay absolutely within the law," he said. "On a personal
level, I paid for this cable." What separates him from other cable
subscribers, he said, is simply that "I have a long extension cord."

But he said he had turned down overseas sports bar owners who want to
show American football to attract expatriate customers. And he has
built roadblocks into his system meant to prevent users from sharing
their video feeds with others.

For now, he says he has not heard from any unhappy networks or
satellite or cable television operators. A spokesman for Time Warner
Cable, the main cable carrier in Manhattan, declined to comment on
either TV2Me or Sony's LocationFree TV.

But just as television companies at first largely ignored digital
video recorders like TiVo, only to wake up later, devices like TV2Me
may offer new challenges and opportunities to the entertainment
industry sooner than expected. TiVo users sometimes refer to their
practice as "time shifting," that is, watching television on their own
time.

Mr. Schaffer refers to the use of his product as "space shifting," as
in watching television in one's own space. (His Web site is www
.spaceshift.net.)

More broadly, Mr. Schaffer hopes that his life of eliminating blind
spots has done just a bit to make humanity safer. "I think the more
that you eliminate borders between countries, people, ideas, the more
likely it is that we're going to make it another couple of hundred
years," he said. "That's what my motivation is."


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