News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

January 11, 2006

hardware

Slingbox and the interim solution

Posted Jan. 11, ’06, 6:42 PM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Hardware

Sling Media In case you’re not familiar, the Slingbox is a device that allows you to access your TV signal or TiVo remotely over the Internet. It takes the video and encodes it on the fly before streaming it to you. I was psyched when I found out that Slingplayer is close to being released for Mac (thanks Jason).

What’s a Mac user to do in the meantime? Well, if you already have one of El Gato’s excellent EyeTV products, then you can get the similar functionality for free using CyTV. Not only will the software let you stream within your own network (where you have oodles of bandwidth), but it will also transcode, allowing one to stream over the net. That includes watching live TV, changing channels, and watching recorded programs. El Gato should snatch the developer, Andreas Junghans, up before someone else does.

Integrating that kind of functionality into their software package could make EyeTV a truly killer product and could compete with the Slingbox in many ways. It would require a Mac to be running so it wouldn’t cut to deep into Slingbox’s customer base however, so Sling Media probably won’t need to worry.

Update: Brian Jaquet of Sling Media actually dropped us an email to tell us this (good thing I fished it out of the spam filter). He even included a screenshot.


Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: