All your digital media goodness.
Here’s the round-up of my Dish Team Summit Nashville trip tweets (with pics) over the last few days (minor edits for accuracy) in chronological order:
I’ve received a few questions asking if I’ve seen the new Sling television commercial. Uh, hello? Yes, of course I’ve seen it! And you can too (without actually watching TV). We’re also running an amusing seasonal radio spot. Click the play button to check it out:
(Unfortunately, my poor Terps closed out the last few weeks of the season with a whimper and are headed to the NIT.)
Feb 22 2008

I pretty regularly find myself in locations where I just can’t function - there’s no network drop, the connection is poor because it’s being shared with dozens of high bandwidth applications, I’m a guest and the LAN requires a local user account, etc. So, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for the right EVDO router. I’ve played with a few models including the Kyocera unit we picked up for CES - only to discover it doesn’t support the two current cards we have… which led to a somewhat disappointing luncheon demo at the Wynn. (The unit’s since been returned.)
A few weeks ago I ended up presenting in a conference room without Ethernet (you’d be surprised how often that happens) or public WiFi, but the hosts offered us a pre-release CradlePoint MBR1000 EVDO router for the afternoon - if I could figure out how to make it work. In less than five minutes I had it unpacked, configured, and feeding my devices via a Sprint EVDO card. I was sold.
The MBR1000 started shipping this week and, as you can see from the pictures, mine’s Sling’s arrived. It retails for $250, but we got it $30 under list via Solid Signal. Not only will this be useful for work, it’ll provide broadband to one of our apartments during the upcoming move and two week overlap. Pretty critical - as I work from home and don’t know how my Comcast migration will play out…
Click thumbnails for a larger view:
Feb 12 2008

Notice any familiar billboards in Burnout Paradise?

Those who’ve been reading ZNF since my early TiVoToGo tutorial days should remember my fondness for the Dr. DivX video conversion utility. I’m not sure what led the DivX folks to kill the original app, but every now and then I find a use for the re-released open source version.
At work, we’re hooking up with Simply Wireless in the DC region and we’ve apparently had a difficult time getting promotional video clips running on some inherited kiosks. I offered to swing by and check out the gear since I’m local… My intention had been to feed some suggestions to those heading up this initiative, but a quick transcode of two unidentified MPEG variants and a WMV file using Dr. DivX was all it took to enable video playback. Do I get the rest of the day off?

Of course, I’m biased. In fact, I may actually have been the guy who named this product - prior to joining Sling. Whereas a Slingbox is desgined to transmit video content, the SlingCatcher is designed to receive video… and display it on your TV. No mere media extender, Catcher is the only product that will receive a Slingbox feed and display it on a television (locally or remotely) with no computer in the mix. We’ll also stream audio/video from your PC, such as Netflix Watch Now or Hulu, to the TV. At CES, our product manager Matt Feinstein described SlingCatcher on camera quite a few times. So check out some of those videos and come back with your questions.