Monsoon Multimedia's Hava Platform - Television Anywhere

The VCR at it's core was a time-shifting device to watch your content when you wanted. Many generations on, we have TiVo, YouTube, and BitTorrent as ways of consuming media when we choose and wherever we want. Television is still the centerpiece of the media consumption lifestyle, though. Despite many attempts to dislodge it from it's perch in the living room, and various efforts to marry the connected personal computer with the television, we are not quite in media nirvana yet.

The Apple TV is a product to watch, given it's ability to place-shift a wee bit, within the environs of your home. The Slingbox was a good solution, in that it encoded your TV signal and streamed it anywhere to any PC. It can only stream content to a single PC, however, and pretty much monopolizes the attached device. Enter the Hava from Monsoon Media. This device encodes and streams television, including HD content to multiple PCs anywhere. What's even more cool, it's being marketed as an OEM device, that will enable it to be embedded in consumer electronics systems and be truly idiot-proof. Pricing is in the Apple TV range, at about $250 to $300, and includes wireless streaming to any PC. It doesn't seem to do the reverse feed, though, enabling you to watch downloaded video content on your television. One product I've had great success with for that kind of media consumption is the Hauppauge MediaMVP device at the low price of $99.

Monsoon Multimedia comes from great founding stock. The founders also established the very successful Dazzle, a pioneer in the MPEG encoding journey. The India-based president, Arvind Jha, was with Adobe India earlier, and the company is based in Noida and has R&D facilities in California and Russia. The team worked almost fifteen months in "garage" mode to develop their best-of-breed technology that allows consumers to watch their home TV from their offices, hotels, airports and from outside the country, wirelessly and on any internet-connected PC. The Monsoon Hava Platform features built-in wi-fi, is Windows Vista and HD-ready, and looks real slick, as one might expect from a consumer electronics-oriented device. It streams MPEG-2 video in the home network, and MPEG-4 across the Internet.

This company demolishes the shibboleth of Indian companies not being risk-takers or product-makers, although I could list at least ten other leading products that had an Indian origin, from Talisma to iFlex. In the borderless world, it seems fatuous to expect innovation to be confined to any location, for that matter. While labour might not have been globalized. one cannot deny that capital and information, the other sinews of the global information economy are effectively place-neutral.

NASSCOM, the Indian association of software and services companies, recognized this, by selecting Monsoon Multimedia as the winner of their IT Innovation India Award for 2006. This award identifies and recognizes efforts made by young and enterprising IT companies that have carved a niche using breakthrough technological products and fresh marketing strategies. They were conferred the award by Mr. Manmohan Singh, who said on the occasion,"Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Singh said, "Business as usual will not work anymore and innovation is the need of the hour."

No news on when the Hava will hit Indian stores.