Never enough time…

• PAL Slingbox released in UK for £179.99. (PC World)
• Sprint ponders expanding mobile video, in talks with Sling. (Reuters)
• TiVo’s quaterly conference call analyzed. (Thomas Hawk)
• New Mac PVR products arrive. (PVRWire)
• iTunes sells overpriced NHL clips. (TUAW)

Check out this over-the-top convergence of technologies! Jim Courtney monitors PGA.com live stats while watching the action from his Slingbox and discussing it with fellow fanatics via Skype.

I’m not sure when the site was updated, but the EFF has dropped a Slingbox reference into their “Fair Use” manifesto. Though it doesn’t seem like HBO or others will be waiting until (if?) the “analog hole” is closed before going after Sling.

EFF says: If you can see or hear it, you can copy it, right? Not if the entertainment companies get to restrict anything that can convert “analog” sound or video to digital bits, including camcorders, sound cards, VCRs, and beyond. Congressional proposals to “plug the analog hole” would restrict both new and ordinary uses. You won’t be able to use tools like the Slingbox to send recorded TV shows to yourself over the Internet. And if you want to excerpt a DVD for a school report, too bad.

Sling Media’s three Slingbox technology patent applications submitted last June have hit the US Patent Office database. Of particular interest is an allusion to the inevitable SlingCatcher device, a hardware appliance designed to receive streaming video for television display without requiring an intermediary computer. I imagine Aussie Ron can hardly wait!

The local clients can be any number of device types, including but not limited to desktop and notebook PCs, Web tablets, PDAs, embedded clients built expressly for the purposes of decoding the streams of the personal broadcaster, and other devices capable of receiving and/or playing a media stream over a network.

As with the local clients, the remote clients may include any number of device types, but not limited to desktop and notebook PCs, Web tablets, PDAs, embedded clients built expressly for the purposes of decoding the streams of the personal broadcaster, and other devices capable of receiving and/or playing a media stream over a network.

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Never enough time…

• Slingbox whips Sony’s LocationFree TV. (Time)
• Porn industry may decide Blu-ray/HD-DVD winner. (PC World)
• DVR installations to grow by 100% a year. (ZDNet)
• No one really wants to buy UMD movies. (Kotaku)

It’s been fairly well documented that you can Sling television feeds around the world, but Hobotech Ron and I wondered what type of quality one could expect outputting that signal to TV. So in the name of science, we broke several international laws to conduct an intercontinental experiment. Ron loaded up his Dell laptop with the SlingPlayer and viewed my Washington, DC-based Slingbox feed from his home in Canberra, Australia. As you can see above, video quality was decent on his rear projection TV with a consistent 320kbps-350kbps download bitrate (which is about what I get here in the US). We believe the limiting factor is not distance, but rather my DSL upload speed which is capped at 384kbps.

Ron says: I hooked it up to the RearPro via S-Video and my wife and I watched it for quite a while and came to the conclusion that, while less than perfect we would be quite happy to watch it, if it provided us with material we couldn’t get from any other source. A little bit like food, while one might prefer a steak, a hamburger will usually do quite well if that’s all that’s available!

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Looks like Sling will be getting some more competition… Sony plans to expand it’s LocationFree TV streaming to include Macs and Windows Mobile devices.

Extreme Tech says: Sony Corp. said Tuesday that it licensed its Location-Free technology to Kaga Electronics, which will port the technology to the Mac OS X platform. “Location Free” allows content on supported platforms to be routed wirelessly, through Son’y LF-PK1 basestation, to other PCs, an LCD monitor or even its Sony PSP handheld. Customers will be able to enjoy “LocationFree” with Windows Mobile and cellular phones as well as Mac OS X(R) product, Sony added.