X

Servers to time-shift TV for U.S. troops in Japan

Will they feel at home? System at the Yokota Air Base will time-shift programs on 33 available channels into their normal U.S. broadcast slots by holding them for nine hours.

Dave Rosenberg Co-founder, MuleSource
Dave Rosenberg has more than 15 years of technology and marketing experience that spans from Bell Labs to startup IPOs to open-source and cloud software companies. He is CEO and founder of Nodeable, co-founder of MuleSoft, and managing director for Hardy Way. He is an adviser to DataStax, IT Database, and Puppet Labs.
Dave Rosenberg

U.S. personnel stationed at Yokota Air Base in Japan are getting a time-shifting server system that will broadcast U.S. television programs at the right time of day--meaning that prime-time shows will be on at the appropriate hour, despite the time difference.

The hardware and software acts as a computerized container, holding a show for nine hours before it's rebroadcast. One is required for each of the 33 channels available on the base.

"The time-shift servers work much like a very large TiVo," Keith Southard, chief executive of San Jose, Calif.-based Allied Telesis Capital, wrote in an e-mail to Stars and Stripes. "They take content in, store it on large hard drives, and then replay the content at the designated time--nine hours later in a continuous stream."

I wonder if there is a way to use a combination of TiVo and Slingbox to get the same effect--though clearly, you couldn't do it on the same scale as you would need to in order to support a large amount of people.