Sony LocationFree

» see sony.jp/products/Consumer/locationfree as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

A LocationFree base station sat in your living room with the aerial and the DVD player plugged into it, encoded whatever they were putting out into MPEG-4, and served it over the internet as IP packets. You connected from a hotel in another country and watched your own television, with an infrared blaster in the box letting you change channels on equipment ten thousand kilometers away. Sony announced it in the first quarter of 2004 and started selling it in the fourth.

The Slingbox did the same job and is the name people remember, but Sony had two things Sling did not. The first was the tablet: a 12.1 inch wireless touchscreen, the LF-X1, sold as a television you carried around the house, later joined by a 7 inch version. The second was the PSP. From base station firmware 2.000 onward a PlayStation Portable on hotel wifi could be the screen, which is a genuinely strange sentence to write about 2005 and was the reason anybody outside the AV hobby noticed the product at all.

Japan gave it the grand prize at the first Net KADEN awards on 3 February 2006. Howard Stringer name-checked it in his CES keynote that January, saying you could watch British television in Tokyo. Sony put LocationFree at the top of its product category list and started licensing the protocol to other manufacturers. Then the line stopped. The last model, the LF-V30, shipped in 2007, and by 2009 every LocationFree product had been withdrawn from sale.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the tablet nobody remembers ~

In October 2004 Sony put out a 12.1 inch rechargeable touchscreen with dual-band wifi, a Memory Stick Duo slot, a web browser that handled SSL and cookies, an email client and a handwriting mode you could draw on. It also worked as a universal AV remote. The LF-X1 cost $1,499 and was sold as a television you carried from room to room, with a 7 inch LF-X5 following in 2005.

This is six years before the iPad and the specification list reads like somebody describing one. The catch is in the pairing. Each tablet was permanently bonded to the base station it shipped with and would refuse every other LocationFree box, including the later models. Sony built the object and then locked it to one television in one house.

~ the licensing knot ~

The original arrangement charged you again for the software. A base station came with a player license for one computer, and connecting a second machine cost more, up to four clients total. Sony dropped the $30 license fee in December 2007 and made the LFA-PC30 player free for Windows XP and Vista owners a few weeks before that, but the software still had to phone Sony's servers to register after thirty days.

That registration requirement is the thread that runs all the way to 2023. Sony had to keep a login service alive for a discontinued box because the box could not work without one, and it did, for sixteen years after the first unit shipped.

~ maneki tv ~

A Japanese company called Nagano Shoten found the obvious business in this. Under the name Maneki TV it would house your LocationFree base station in its facility in Japan, connected to a Japanese aerial, and you could watch Japanese broadcasts from wherever you had emigrated to. The hardware was yours. The company only provided rack space and a fast line.

NHK and the commercial networks spent five years trying to stop it. Tokyo District Court threw out their injunction on 4 August 2006 and the IP High Court agreed that December. A full trial in June 2008 found no copyright infringement, and the appeal court upheld that in December 2008. Then on 18 January 2011 the Supreme Court of Japan reversed everything: anybody who signs a contract counts as the public, Nagano Shoten was the entity feeding programs into the machines, and that made it the transmitter. The remand in January 2012 awarded damages. Maneki TV announced its own closure in February 2013.

~ fourteen years past the last box ~

Sony posted the notice on 29 November 2022 and followed it with a confirmation on 1 March 2023. The Net AV function, the part that let a base station be reached from outside the home network, ended on 28 February 2023. Owners reported the Net AV indicator on the front of the LF-PK20 turning orange afterward, a small light going the wrong color on a machine bought around 2007.

Turkey never got these. Sony sold LocationFree in Japan, with separate models for the North American and European markets, and the product presumed a home television service worth carrying abroad, which is a business traveler's problem rather than a nineteen-year-old's. What replaced it arrived as a standard rather than a box. In February 2014 Japan's NexTV-F published a remote viewing specification, and Sony shipped it as a firmware update to recorders people already owned, pairing up to six phones at a time with a three-month expiry on each. Nothing in that arrangement is a thing you can put in a bag.

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