Time-shifting is the ability to watch your favourite TV programs at leisure. With VCR storage technology, this was available decades ago. Of course, digital video recorders like TiVo added a new dimension to time-shifting - by providing a high degree of automation.

Place-shifting on the other hand simply meant that you could "view" your TV programs from another location. Starting off as a service offered by TiVo which allowed TiVo users to view recorded content on other PCs over a local network, this "progressed" to technologies like TV2ME, Sling Media & others which redirected TV signals to another city/country via the Internet. Giving rise to the term "Anywhere TV".

However today, place-shifting is taking altogether new meanings.

Place-Shifting

In addition to "Anywhere TV", the viewer suddenly has "multiple modes of watching" - PC, iPod, cell phone or the plain ol' TV set!

Additonally, services like video-on-demand & online digital archives (downloads) gives the viewer complete control.

And on another level, Mobile Television is giving a new meaning to "Anywhere TV" - with the "television set" moving with the viewer!

However, the implications of place-shifting go beyond that.

The origin of place-shifting can be linked to the digital video recorder (made famous by TiVo). By recording favourite shows and uploading on servers provided by (mostly illegal) services like Napster, it was possible not only to "share" with others, but also to download & view from anywhere in the world.
As is well-known, "file-sharing" services like Napster had to ultimately shutdown following U.S. Court decree - as they were promoting piracy of TV content.

Watershed for Online TV
It was around October 2005, Apple released its video iPod. That was also when it convinced ABC TV that content download was the way many viewers would see their content - legal or otherwise. Resulting in content owner ABC TV partnering with Apple to offer downloads of its latest episodes of "Desperate Housewives" @ $2/- per episode on Apple's just-released video-capable iPod.

As expected, a number of channels like NBC have since joined the iPod bandwagon!

So, could October 2005 be counted as a "watershed" date for TV Everywhere? Be that as it may, the video iPod must certainly go down in history as the first official stamp of an established TV network accepting to distribute content online!

Ironically, since the basic delivery was web-based, all this was possible because of the massive penetration of broadband service mostly via cable modems!

Again because of its web-based nature, the video iPod exercise resulted in an increasing number of networks launching broadband channels, even if on a "testing-the-waters" basis.

By the way, another parallel platform which experienced a positive fall-out was cable TV's video-on-demand (VOD) service. VOD which was lingering for want of prime content, got a boost when CBS TV Network hosted episodes of hit programs like "Survivor" & "CSI" in Comcast digital cable homes for $ 1/-. (Other TV Networks are following suit.)

Advertising, Content, Eyeballs

• For the marketer, it's revenue.
• Internet advertising revenues grew by 30% to cross $12 billion in 2005.
• And Q4 - 2005 reported the highest revenue ever. So it made imminent sense for TV Networks to create web-based properties.
• Moreover, what's interesting is that most online attempts of TV networks have actually resulted in attracting the growing Internet eyeballs to TV programs! Perhaps, the huge demand for Internet bandwidth (100+ MB per streaming channel) is still the prohibitive factor.
• Not to mention that TV content producers can charge/share fee from  web-sites & mobile operators for their content.
• But for the eyeballs (viewers), it remains & will remain, a matter of more options for their convenience.