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60 Day
In this age of PVRs, Bit-Torrent downloads and podcasting, it’s
possible to argue that plain old broadcast television has had its day.
Unless it’s something you really have to watch live, like a football
match, why should people be forced to watch what’s on at the time instead
of consuming what they want at the time of their choosing.
So while we wait for TV on demand to become the de-facto delivery
medium, SlingMedia’s SlingBox is a clever device that promises to make TV
seem fresh again. Why? It enables you to watch your TV from anywhere in
the world as long as you have Internet access. That's cool.
The Slingbox was born out of frustration after the founders of the
company found themselves unable to watch their beloved baseball,
basketball or ‘Football’ team, (or whatever sport it is that seems
fascinate Americans so much), when they were on holiday. This gave them
the idea of using the Internet to bring their home TV to them. SlingMedia
calls it ‘placeshifting’.
So how does it work? It’s actually quite simple. The Slingbox is a
small box that connects to your cable or satellite set-top box, and then
to your home router. The Slingbox takes the incoming TV signal from the
set-to box and encodes it on the fly into a Windows Media video stream.
Once you’ve installed some software onto your PC or laptop you can then
access that TV stream, whether you’re sitting in the same room as your
set-top box or in an amphitheatre in Rome. The Slingbox is a one on one
experience though – only one person can access it at one time, so you
can’t share your TV with a group of friends.
The requirements then are that you have a router and a fast enough
connection in your home to upload the video stream and a decent Internet
connection to access the stream when you’re outside of your home network.
Anyone with broadband connection with an upload speed of 300Kbps should be
fine. The great thing about the software is that the faster the connection
at either end, the better the picture quality. This is because the
SlingPlayer software can automatically adjust the bit-rate to give you the
best viewing experience.
The icing on the cake is that you can remotely control your set-top box
as if you’re sitting in front of it. The candles on top of the cake are
that you don’t even need a set-top box as the Slingbox has a built-in
DVB-T tuner. This has been especially added for the UK specific version of
the Slingbox and it’s great to see a US company taking the time and
trouble to create a truly version specific version of its product rather
than just assume that what’s fine in the US works across the
pond.
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