New Hotness: Slingplayer Mobile
A few weeks ago, I bought a Slingbox - a funky looking but nifty $200 device that allows you to "placeshift" content from your cable box, satellite box, or digital video recorder. Last night, I finally got a chance to set it up (took all of 5 minutes, those Slingbox folks did a great job making this stuff easy to use) and connected it to one of my ReplayTVs. It is darn cool - from my laptop with an internet connection, I control my ReplayTV so that I can watch live television, recorded shows on that ReplayTV, and thanks to DVArchive, all the Replay shows that I've squirreled away my server.
Today I tried a new twist - Slingplayer Mobile and it is my current vote for New Hotness of 2006. Running on my handy Sprint PPC-7700 I have here at work, I was blown away - all of my recorded content, plus 250 channels of live satellite TV, anywhere I want. I got great performance on Sprint's EVDO network (minimum requirement was 112kbps of reliable bandwidth). I tried bluetoothing from my Dell PDA to my day to day phone so I could have the T-Mobile EDGE experience, and it wasn't quite there - I would get a few seconds that worked, then the video would break up. T-Mobile doesn't seem to quite have reliable 112kbps EDGE yet.
This experience had me finally get mobile video - what will win will not be not necessarily be the 50 or 60 channels of random stuff that is being offered, but personalized, on demand, what I want when I want it content. Mark my words!
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