The Homa Files

Excerpted from The Washington Post “A Lot for Sports Fans to Like, but the New Slingbox Still Isn’t a Slam Dunk” by Rob Pegoraro, September 25, 2008

* * * * *

Watching television on a computer screen is no special achievement these days. Between the free streaming video on the Web and TV downloads at iTunes and elsewhere, you don’t need to work too hard to turn your computer into a replacement for the tube.

But if you can watch your own TV — with your local shows, your team’s games, your recorded programs — on a computer monitor, and do so hundreds of miles from your home, now that’s something else…

That’s the trade-off of the Slingbox, the Web-connected “personal broadcaster” from Sling Media. Today, this division…is introducing the latest Slingbox, a high-definition device that fixes two flaws of earlier versions but can’t do much about some other underlying issues.

The new $299.99 Slingbox Pro-HD, like older models, can take any video input and relay it over the Internet to a computer or smartphone running SlingPlayer software. But with a simple antenna, this model’s digital TV tuner can pull in high-definition broadcasts off the air for free; with enough bandwidth, it can send those programs out in nearly their original quality.

With the player comes an updated SlingPlayer 2.0 that — finally — adds pause, rewind and forward controls. You still can’t record a broadcast, but you can now pause it and zip ahead or behind.

A review unit loaned by the company, running an almost-final version of its software, usually performed those tasks without complaint but still exhibited glitches…

Slingbox owners seem as passionate about these boxes as any group of gadget enthusiasts, in many cases for a simple reason: This is the easiest way to follow their sports teams when they travel or move out of town…

Edit by SAC

* * * * *

Full article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/24/AR2008092403037_pf.html

* * * * *

Want more from the Homa Files?
Click link => The Homa Files Blog

This entry was posted on October 7, 2008 at 7:00 am and is filed under Digital Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.