Another Expansys exclusive it would seem, but the Slingbox Classic is now being sold for £59.95 on their UK site – a bit of a bargain for a piece of kit that has some very nice video streaming features.
I was responsible for testing this piece of kit for a certain UK operator, when they wanted to see how it could be used to output the video stream for an STB (Set-top box) to a mobile device (in this case it was a Windows Mobile device) – suffice to say after a bit of a fiddle setting it up, I got some nice quality streaming from my STB, out over my broadband connection, across the net, in to my mobile operator’s 3G network, and to the device.
Probably the beauty of the system is not just being able to watch TV remotely, but also to be able to control the STB remotely – that’s right, because there was a Slingbox client running on the Mobile device, it meant return signals could be sent back to Slingbox, which had it’s own IR sender, to control the box!
In addition, because Slingbox have also created PC clients, it means that the Slingbox could effectively encode the output of the STB, and broadcast it to any client registered to that particular Sling unit.
Slingbox were first to mass-market with their Sling concept, which is another way of saying place-shifting your viewing – a good part of the trend towards Convergence no less…
Anyhoo, there is the “classic” box, which is now obviously slightly older – but also there are newer models which are slightly smaller, and have other features. So if you want to check out the classic go here, else go to Sling Media site here and check out the new models.