Cablevision Battles Boxee with PC-to-TV Relay

February 24, 2010 By Nick Mokey

Cablevision’s new technology will allow cable users to flip to a channel and see whatever they have on their PC screens, opening the door for Internet content beside regular cable.

Apparently, we’re not the only ones cancelling our cable TV subscriptions to enjoy free Internet programming from the likes of Hulu, YouTube, and more. And cable companies are feeling the pinch. After losing enough customers to Internet-only packages, New York’s Cablevision is fighting fire with fire by bundling the option of Internet TV alongside traditional cable programming.

The company’s so-called “PC to TV Media Relay” will essentially act as a big, invisible HDMI cable, allowing customers to pipe anything from a PC display onto their televisions through a dedicated channel that they can flip to on their cable boxes. On the computer side, it will only require a simple software download, which will link up the PC with the corresponding cable channel and display everything on the screen – a clever workaround that should allow consumers to enjoy all the same content they typically do, whether it’s downloaded seasons of Lost, the latest episode of Modern Family on Hulu, or a slideshow of family vacation pictures.

The biggest caveat we foresee here: Users will still need to use the computer to control content, whether that means queuing up content from a laptop on the couch, or using a wireless mouse and keyboard to control a desktop in the other room. Depending on the technologies Cablevision employs to send video data from desktop to cable box, recompressing video that has already been compressed once to send it across the Web could also potentially cause some image degradation.

“With our PC to TV Media Relay service, we are putting an end to the need for families to huddle around their laptops or PCs to watch content together,” said Tom Rutledge, Cablevision’s Chief Operating Officer, in a statement. “This new service will make it easy for our television customers to take broadband services including Internet video, as well as family photos or anything else displayed on a computer screen and move it to the television with the click of the mouse,”

Cablevision, which provides service to 3 million households in the New York metro area, will begin rolling the service out in June as trial run, with pricing yet to be announced.

Showing 5 comments

rusty_shackleford_33 at 6:19pm 25th February 2010 As silly as this is from the perspective of someone who knows and understands they can do this with a simple cable, I can see it actually getting popular with mainstream audiences who don't have as much patience. When a totally nontechie person can find something cool on their laptop, flip to channel 3 and see it on their TV with no wires, I can see it taking off, even though there's nothing miraculous about it to those of us in the know.
Ian Bell at 5:17pm 25th February 2010 Or to record a program on your home DVR from the office using your PC.
Rich at 4:44pm 25th February 2010 I think Cablevision should instead focus on providing some of the features that Verizon FiOS already has...an example would be the ability to send a DVR-recorded movie to any cable box elsewhere in the house.
andrewkippen at 5:59pm 24th February 2010 Don't think there's a battle here - for existing Cablevision subscribers we hope this means they'll be able to get all that Boxee offers as a great supplement to their cable package. Users can use an iPhone, iPod Touch, or upcoming Boxee RF Remote (by D-Link) to navigate Boxee even when they're in the other room in front of their TV.
Dana at 5:53pm 24th February 2010 Isn't it easy enough to just hook your computer up to a flat screen tv? I don't see how this will be such a huge draw.