Sling Media is mostly known for its "SlingBox", a piece of hardware that lets users stream their regular TV signals to wherever they want. Its "Sling Catcher", which allows TV signals to be transferred from room to room in a user’s house is getting ready to ship as well.
 
Sling.com will combine streaming content from as many as sixty partners with the home television streaming capabilities of the Slingbox, which includes "on demand" and DVR content – the whole enchilada. In other words, if this is all it’s cracked up to be, Hulu, Joost, and others better be thinking of new edges as well, or at least adding the home-TV concept into their current packages, and partnering with as many content providers as possible.

As I’ve said nearly every day this week, I believe, we are seeing strides made every day toward a future of online video domination, and this offering from Sling looks to be the latest piece of the pie, and potentially a pretty big one at that.

It’s not even launched yet though, so I’m not going to hype it up anymore than that. Just suffice it to say, I’m intrigued. I can’t wait to see what video news surfaces tomorrow. I’m still pretty excited about the Netflix Starz partnership, if just for the simple fact that Netflix seems to be taking the expansion of its streaming content catalog more seriously.  TechCrunch has a look at an email Sling sent to its Beta invitees, and Mercury News has more details on the SlingCatcher if you’re interested.

First, unlike Sling, it doesn’t need to be hooked directly up to your access point via Ethernet. You just need an 802.11g wireless network.

Second, if you’re on your home network the quality is a lot better than my Sling is. A large percentage of the time I’m using Sling I’m just sitting on the couch watching something different than Maryam is watching (hey, sometimes we don’t agree on the shows that we should watch. For instance, I can watch football while she watches old versions of Lost).

Third, it plugs into Microsoft’s Media Center. Which really rocks. Basically it fakes a tuner to Media Center (a large percentage of Media Center machines sold don’t have any tuners, if they have a HAVA box it will extend TV into those machines anywhere in the home that wifi reaches). I’m going to use this on my new Media Center that’ll be in my office upstairs while my satellite TV tuners will be downstairs.

Cost? $249 (there’s a $50 rebate right now until the end of the month). Only available on the Web right now, in retail in US in September, elsewhere around the world like Asia and Europe by the end of the year.

You hook your settop box (TV system) or, really, any video source like a DVD player, into the back. As long as you have an 802.11g network (must be “G”, not just the older “B”) it’ll work fine. You load some software on each client to view the video. Windows only today, but they are working on Macintosh versions. They are also working on mobile versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian (due around September).

Anyway, very cool device. I’m going to get one to compare more fully to my SlingMedia box, but the comparisons I’m seeing here look pretty damn good!

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

Go to Scobleizer …