Slingmedia is going to be a major player in the digital home

Michael Gartenberg | January 08, 2007, 12:13 PM

Lots of stuff coming out of CES but one of the more interesting announcements was the new stuff coming out of the Slingmedia folks. What is the Sling Catcher? Well it sounds like a reverse Sling Box to take content from your PC to your TV (and with hints of more stuff to come, no doubt part of the efforts of the new Sling team based in NY). So it's just another Media adapter, right? Wrong! The reason this is different is that that Sling folks have already solved the network issues related to getting content from one part of my home to another (even over standard WiFi or Powerline). I regularly watch TV content over my plain old 80211 network at home on my PC (and my PC and Smartphone etc. on the road). The folks have some proven technology that I imagine will make its way into the Sling catcher product. Let's face it, this space is littered with dead products that just didn't work well. It will be really intersting to see how this product is going to fare against the likes of iTV (especially since Sling isn't tied to any particular set of DRM technologies).

There's been a lot of action in place shifting over the last year but for all intents and purposes, no one is even close to where sling is in terms of device support or overall functionality and quality. This new announcement serves to make them one of the key players in the digital home as they allows users to distribute and integrate multiple devices and content repositories and allow consumers to access them wherever they are, both within and outside the home.