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CES report: Sling Media's slingbox personal broadcaster

Sling Media is a new recently funded startup out of Silicon Valley and they debuted their Slingbox Personal Recorder at CES to much praise (as I was checking it out, someone from TechTV was dropping off a finalist award for most innovative product). If Mike Pusateri hadn't told me it was a killer product I had to check out, I would have missed it entirely. Amazingly enough, I found it purely by chance minutes after I first arrived (it would take me three more hours to even find TiVo).

Slingbox's booth at CES

What the box does is pretty simple -- it streams video wherever you are, but what is novel is how simple and well it works. In the past, people have setup rogue websites streaming TV and they've always been quickly shut down. What the Slingbox does is mimic that in a way, but lets you broadcast your own TV to your own computer, no matter where you are on earth, and should steer clear of any copyright problems since it is personal use only. What TiVo does is timeshift content to when you want to see it, and what Sling Media calls this is "placeshifting," letting you see it where you want.

The slingbox itself is weirdly shaped black thing that looks vaguely like a giant chocolate bar and it's got a set of AV inputs and outputs along with an ethernet connection. Once it's on your network, you can watch full screen streaming TV on any computer in your local network. It used a proprietary video viewer that looked like a skinned version of windows media player. The other major feature is that if you take your laptop with you to work or a cafe, you can also watch TV there as well.

The Slingbox client playing on a laptop, with a Slingbox sitting next to it

According to the Sling Media rep I talked to, even with the typical low upstream bandwidth of a home broadband connection you can still get some pretty good video outside of your home network. When you connect with the client, the app figures out how much bandwidth is available and the slingbox transcodes the video on the fly at the bitrate the network can sustain. The rep said it can work behind NAT routers, figuring out what ports are available and using those as needed for outside connections. The rep also stated that can control your home theater via its own IR blaster, and that you can completely control a TiVo remotely with the device, letting you select shows and play them back remotely.

The box is $249 and should be shipping this summer, without any setup fees or subscriptions. It sounds like a great simple piece of single-purpose hardware, and if I didn't already have a streaming TV hack setup at home I'd seriously consider one. It sounds like the perfect way to catch the previous night's Daily Show when you're eating lunch at your desk at work, or a great way to make sure your TiVo is going to catch a recording you set while traveling.

by Matt Haughey January 9, 2005 in News

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