SLing Thoughts
So I had this brainfart thought last night while driving home about Sling Media and their recent influx of VC funding, some 46 million that is. The more I slept on the idea the more i'm suprised that no one has gotten into competition with them over the concept.
So slingbox simply compresses my tv signal from my home and makes it available on the web, the video side of me says "big whooop" really but i cant help but wonder, how easily is that duplicatable by say, another savvy chinese techno duplication firm? Have i tried the tech? No not yet, but its a perfect solution for my brother who can't get cable or sat tv at home in sunbury ohio. He could get the cable at work and sling it home, and that'd fix his need for Alais, though they i heard on the net a few days ago they are going to cancel that show... sorry Rumbaldi, you had a good run.
I like Sling, it makes TIVO sexier. CNET had a bit blurb where they had Slingbox workin with TIVO runnin on mac, that was sexy but even sexier was that they also had it running on an EVDO powered phone. 30 FPS from yer tv set up at home running on yer phone, that is pretty frickin slick. Course you need a smartphone. I think Chris still has one of those actually.
My orignial thought though was flawed, apparently u cant have multiple people all working off the same sling media stream. But if you could.. you for example build one massive setup. Say 10 people all chip in on a massive all channel multiple recorder setup, and then strap all that to a sling and then people simply chip in on the feed divide by 10 and that could be pretty sexy. Sure we'd all be strapped to our laptops or pcs to watch our content but we'd get our shows at decent cost... and i thought that'd be a fun project to set up. But then I read the bit about Sling's inability to support same time access from other users, so that kinda kills the idea.
Competition wise the net tells me Orb and Sony's Location Free TV idea are the only other gigs in town. I've got an ORB account and I guess I haven't looked into all it features in how it could be used as a full feature cable/tivo placeshifter like Sling can be, I'll have to look into that. ORB is great at just making my pc media available to me anywhere I want, but it comes off as well.... in development still.
...this just in after more digging.. TV2ME? ... it does seem to get bad reviews on the net especially considering its 5k price tag.
In other semi-related news is the CISCO on the move dealio to get more goodness for the living room. In the days of the first tech bubble CISCO was front and center with all the crazyness with their tech in routers, then boom they exploded, now a few years later they are making the scene once again, first they gobble up LinkSys a popular wifi brand for the home and bizness, then they get Scientific American (back in the november 05), and yesterday they were spotted on the net talking about eatin TIVO or Nintendo even.. or maybe even makin a play for Sling. For more data on Sling, check out SlingCommunity.
Also a fun read is simply looking at Engadget's Award vote for best/worst of 2005, now there's a nice little tech download for ya.
And in unrelated news, Puffin - check it - boodle. Oh and listen to this.
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