Spotlight: Sling Media SlingCatcher & SlingBox

Articles: Event Coverage: CES 2007

Pre-CES | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Extended Coverage

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Anthony Fiti
Brian

Jan. 8, 2007

Specifications

Spotlight: Sling Media SlingCatcher & SlingBox

Sling Media had one new piece of hardware to demo at CES 2007, called the SlingCatcher. It is a box that will output the streams from other Slingboxes from across the Internet and display them on your TV. It also can stream content from PCs. While this might not be a direct competitor to Apple's iTV and Netgear's Digital Entertainer HD, it still competes in the same space, in the same price range.

They also showed off a new alpha piece of software that would allow them to playback video on the Palm OS. Previously, they had been limited to only being able to view video on Windows Mobile devices. The other new piece of software was the next version of the SlingPlayer for Vista. Using the new .Net 3.0 API to enhance the appearance of the application.

Their Sling Pro unit is still he most impressive - it accepts all sorts of inputs and even has a break out box that has HD inputs. I have taken an interest in one of their devices, the Sling Tuner, which takes a coax input from your cable company and without a TV just has an analog cable TV tuner in the box and has an Ethernet port to hook up to your network and allows you to view all your analog channels from anywhere on the internet.

Finally, one more interesting feature is their integration with HP's QuickPlay system on their laptops. What this functionality provides is the ability to watch content from Slingboxes without having to boot into Windows. Instead of waiting for Windows to load, and then to deal with the overhead, you just go directly into the SlingPlayer. This feature is expected to be implemented in HP notebooks sometime in 2007.

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2 User Comments

1 - Posted by techgeek42 on January 12, 2007 - 12:24 pm

SlingCatcher looks pretty darn cool. A perfect accessory to the Slingbox. The Sling Community also has a video on it and more information about what it does. I found it http://www.slingcommunity.com/article/17844/SlingC...

2 - Posted by handrail on January 12, 2007 - 6:14 pm

yeah, the sling media stuff was super sweet. they are working on wireless handheld devices too. watching a live video feed of the goldengate bridge on a treo was great!

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