Sling Media starts to take over the (multimedia) world
There's been a ton of news out of Sling Media during the first few days of CES. This morning, the company officially unveiled SlingPlayer Mobile for PalmOS. A public beta of the Palm client is due out by the end of January, with an official launch date scheduled for the first quarter of 2007. There's no word yet on pricing, but seeing as SlingPlayer Mobile for Windows Mobile has been available for a while with a price of $30, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say the Palm version will be comparably priced.
Sling also announced today that they'll be bundling some of their software with new HP notebooks, and they're demonstrating that SlingPlayer works with Vista, although I think the big surprise would have been if their software didn't run on Vista.
The other big news from Sling started to leak yesterday when we told you about a new product, the SlingCatcher. What this new $200 box will let you do is stream video from any device in your home hooked up to a Slingbox to another room where you've got a SlingCatcher plugged in. Up until now, you could only watch Slingbox video streams through a software client on a computer or mobile device.
The SlingCatcher comes with two new bits of software. SlingProjector lets you basically see whatever's on your PC screen on your TV. While you can manage the same task using a video card with a TV-out port, SlingProjector does the trick through a PC client and a home network. You can sit with your laptop in front of your TV, browse to a YouTube video or streaming TV show, click play and sit back to watch the video on your television set.The other new software is SlingPlayer for TV, which lets you stream video from a Slingbox to a SlingPlayer. If you've got a Slingbox plugged into your TiVo in the living room and want to watch recordings in the bedroom SlingPlayer for TV will let you do that. You should be able to use the same software to control your home TiVo or other video appliances from a SlingCatcher installed at your grandmother's house (or anywhere else for that matter). This puts Sling Media in a pretty good position to compete with Apple's forthcoming iTV product, which is designed to let you watch iTunes videos downloaded on your PC in your living room. If Apple doesn't have some major announcements about additional functions in the iTV at this week's Macworld, they'll be losing a lot of momentum, which is funny because many of the other companies like Sling Media announced their connected-home devices after Steve Jobs first mentioned the iTV in September.
