As most of my friends would attest to, I'm a bit of a gadget-hound. I'm not nearly as bad as I used to be, but that has probably has more to do with my habit of spreading around my discretionary funds a bit more on good wine, food and overpriced golf equipment.
So, it's somewhat surprising to me that I didn't rush out and buy a Slingbox when they first came out. It's something that I would jumped all over in the past, but there were two obstacles that I couldn't get past, a) I was primarily using a PowerBook as my main laptop, and there was no Mac client available, and b) I just wasn't traveling enough the justify the expense.
Sling Media released a Mac client late last year, but I still wasn't traveling much, so I continued to pass on it. Once I took the gig with ATG, however, I realized that I would be on the road quite a bit - with a ThinkPad. What a perfect excuse to buy a new toy!
While I was setting my home office, I remembered that I had a Tivo Series 2 box that had been gathering dust for almost a year. So, I split my Comcast signal off the run to my cable modem, ran it through my Tivo, and introduced a new Slingbox AV to the family. Taking a cue from Apple, the packaging was very minimal, as were the instructions. It was a piece of cake to setup, even considering that you have to make some considerable changes to your router in order to access it from the Internet.
As misfortune would have it, my first two trips while on the job with ATG were during some of the worst weather we've had all winter. Three of the first four flights I took were canceled, so I had ample opportunity to try my new toy out.
All I can say is wow!
The last time I had a similar reaction is when I bought my first Tivo, which is pretty much when they were released. Personally, the technology doesn't make me do back flips. It's taking a a video signal, compressing the hell out of it, and jamming it to a client via TCP/IP. What I find fantastic is the execution of the client, and the transference of the controls of whatever unit I have hooked up. I will have to say that the system does a great job of automating the resolution and buffering rate to match your Internet connection.
I was stuck in a lousy hotel in D.C. after (another) canceled flight, and decided to watch the latest episode of "24" on my Tivo from my room ( I know...lame, but the hotel bar sucked). I barely had a connection worth surfing with, but the client and hardware teamed up to give me a pretty reasonable experience. It probably had to buffer about 45-60 seconds of video in order to maintain a lag-free connection, but the client never gave it up once.
The whole concept of place-shifting media is still firmly in the category of an unjustified luxury for many, many people. But it wasn't that long ago when you could say the same thing about Tivo and time-shifting in general, and now it seems that PVR's are everwhere. I think this all bodes well for the evolution of media delivery via broadband.
