High definition ‘anytime, anywhere’ TV is here

Indian engineers helped craft Monsoon Multimedia’s ‘Hava Titanium HD’

— Photo: By special arrangement

Place shifter: The Hava Titanium streams high definition video to a TV, laptop or mobile phone, anywhere, through a home wireless network — or over the Internet.

Bangalore: India-based engineers of the San Mateo (California)-based Monsoon Multimedia have contributed core technology that went into the latest version of their TV place-and-time-shifting tool, Hava.

In the process, they have virtually erased the difference between a personal computer and a television set and now offer the ability to view tomorrow’s high definition (HD) video content from TV or DVD player, on any number of screens in other rooms at home — or on a remote laptop, even a mobile phone on another continent, via Internet.

Hava Titanium HD, as it is called, arguably takes the technology of ‘any time, any where’ TV further than any competing offering currently available. It was launched in the U.S. a few months ago. The Hindu was enabled to put the Titanium HD through its paces ahead of its availability in India (in July) — and this is our ‘take.’

The key function of the latest Hava ‘avatar’ remains the same: it is a ‘set top box’ that when connected to the video ‘out’ of a TV or a VCD/DVD player, wirelessly streams it to multiple PCs or laptops in the home, using a home WiFi network.

This is made much easier in the new version by providing a WiFi ‘dongle’ or wireless network adaptor working to the 802.11g standard, and conveniently fitted with a USB-type connector.

In other words, anything you view on your main TV set can also be seen in other rooms of the house, without having to lay a lot of cables. But the really useful feature of such systems is the ability to shift your viewing in both time and place: You can choose from the TV content in your home cable system and stream it to a laptop any where in the world, via the Internet... provided of course the connection is fast enough, that is broadband speed. You can even view the content on a Windows Mobile-based smart mobile phone.

Titanium is the first such system that has been beefed up to be ‘HD ready’ — able to stream video to the quality demanded by high definition TV which will be standard in a few years. One nice bonus: The device can turn any PC or laptop linked to it into a video recorder — that means you can record a TV programme and store it on the hard disk for later viewing or archiving. You can then ‘burn’ it on to a DVD if you want.

It is priced at around $ 250 abroad, but is being aggressively discounted: we saw websites offering it for $ 200( http://www.monsoonmultimedia.com/)... the India price has not yet been announced. As technology constantly improves, the goalpost shifts, but in the global ‘TV anywhere’ product space, the Hava Titanium HD is as good as it gets today — with the creative ‘hava’ clearly blowing from India to the world.