Topic: Streaming Television is here!

[Brian]

There is a very cool device that I got a nice demo of called a Slingbox.

http://www.slingmedia.com/

At school the instructor was showing us on his notebook, wireless of course, as he was walking around showing us the television show that was also being shown in his home, simeltaneously being streamed to his notebook computer in the classroom.

There is about a 30 second delay as the slingbox device buffers, but this is the coolest thing becuase it allows you to connect to Tivo, Digital or analog cable, satellite, or your DVR's. In fact you can record and pause what ever you are watching. The quality depends on bandwidth, but with ample bandwidth you can stream very high quality (MPEG 4 I think).

You can control the channel, programming, or what ever for that matter, via the on-screen virtual remote controls. So literally when he changed the channel on the notebook, it was changing the channel in his home on that cable set top box.

Pretty damn cool if you ask me!

They call it Place Shifting, to describe what this device does.

Oh, you can only connect a single IP to this device at a time. What is cool though (from a security standpoint) is that this device uses only one IP, and it is a PnP device so it can auto-configure your router in most cases.

$200 and you can watch your programs anywhere you can obtain a broadband connection.