Mark Cuban, YouTube, TiVo, and Sling Media hit the Hill yesterday, chatting up the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee.

• Congress gets earful on net neutrality, CableCARD, YouTube: Ars Technica
• Congressman-Cam Debuts on YouTube: NewTeeVee
• Hill-icon Valley: Washington Post

I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how the Slingbox compliments Apple TV. Being a Sling Media employee, I helped put together a short video from one of our labs. We demonstrate using a Slingbox PRO and HD Connect to placeshift Apple TV iTunes content to a Sprint Motorola Q and Windows laptop. Our new SlingPlayer for Mac v1.0 embeds the necessary IR codes to allow this remote control.

No, that isn’t me narrating. Though you will see my hand in the video and my first stab at an iMovie project. I promise to get better… and use a tripod.

In other Sling news, I’ve noticed an interesting trend… It seems like folks in the broadcast industry are beginning to use Slingboxes in lieu of costly hardware and satellite uplinks to ship video around. For example, at CTIA, I heard from one network that successfully sent feeds from the World Cup in Germany to their studios in NYC. Along those lines, CNET interviewed the Bay Area CBS affiliate who use more than 20 Slingboxes to broadcast their traffic and weather cameras.

As you may have read yesterday, Sling Media (my employer) released SlingPlayer for Mac 1.0. The beta version of this software has been available for several months — And since launch we’ve beefed up our staff with several former Apple employees, served up over 80,000 downloads (of .145), and squashed hundreds of bugs. Feedback from the Mac community was instrumental in producing the sharp new Aqua interface. While v1 is a milestone, this is not the first nor will it be our last OS X software update. Our Mac dev team is a permanent fixture here at Sling and will continue to improve performance and add features (as we do with PC and mobile clients).

Some hands on coverage in blogland:

• My Apple TV Over Slingbox Hands On
• Sling Player For Mac Goes GM
• SlingPlayer for Mac OS X goes gold today

Some SlingPlayer for Mac references:

• SlingPlayer for Mac download page
• SlingPlayer for Mac user guide (pdf)
• Using SlingPlayer with Apple TV (pdf)
• SlingPlayer for Mac support page

I just received word that Woot is blowing out refurbished Slingbox Classics for a low $70. As with all Woot deals, this is one day only and while supplies last. To answer the obvious question: A primary difference between the Classic and the current lineup is resolution. The new boxes broadcast at higher resolutions up to 640×480… However, unless you have FiOS, you’ll only see it on the LAN. So for most WAN and all smartphone playback, the quality is similar amongst Slingboxes.

In conjunction with the Woot deal, we (I’m employed by Sling Media) are running a secret promotion for $20 off the 4-port Slinglink Turbo. This is a zero-config powerline ethernet adapter pair with four ports — meaning you can network multiple devices like my Xbox 360, TiVo Series 3, and Slingbox PRO… or whatever you need to connect.

Do I have a great job or what? Last month I hit CTIA in Orlando, and now here I am at NAB. Blake (aka Sling founder/CEO) is giving the portable media keynote tomorrow and I’ll be manning our booth at Piero’s in the evening. So if you’re in Vegas… drop on by, say hello, maybe see some unreleased software.

I bumped into fellow ZNF blogger Rakesh (aka SnapStream CEO) in the airport cab line. He has a booth (upper South Hall, 13310) and is breaking some new ground with their software offerings.

The Lost Remote gang is also on site, hosting a panel and get together Tuesday afternoon (which conflicts with my flight out to CA).

And while I’m not staying at the Wynn, I do have a nice view (above) from my hotel room.

In case you didn’t catch the news yesterday, CBS is expanding their online video presence. Instead of funneling folks onto a single video site, they’re taking a different approach by providing CBS content to a variety of online destinations. We at Sling Media (my employer) are psyched to expand our relationship with CBS (see Clip+Sling) and will provide some pretty interesting ways to view their programming…

Gizmodo:

Speaking of Sling Media, that company plans more than just a video portal; it’s going to allow playback through SlingPlayer software, and the idea is also to get content from the internet to TV via its SlingCatcher. Plus, users will be able to share that content with each other, bandwidth permitting, of course.

TV Squad:

While most of the partners are online video websites and portals, Sling Media is in the business of letting users stream their own media over the internet. Sling Media plans to launch a Clip+Sling online video site this summer, which will feature CBS content. But users will also be able to watch the videos using SlingPlayer software, or using the upcoming SlingCatcher box, which lets users watch web video on their television sets.

Live Digitally:

I chatted briefly with Dave Zatz from Sling Media, and from what I understand Sling’s participation is unique in that they will not only have a Web portal, but can also bring CBS content into the SlingPlayer on PCs and in the future, to the SlingCatcher device.

Several people have gotten in touch regarding yesterday’s CNET blog post:

Apple TV does not stream over the Internet or across a cellular phone network, but the SlingBox does. And Sling Media, the maker of the SlingBox, confirmed to CNET News.com on Monday that the company is working on making the Slingbox compatible with Apple TV. The most likely–and compelling–scenario would be to allow the streaming of Apple TV content to a mobile device.

Yes, I can confirm this is accurate. (I work for Sling Media.) The Slingbox currently supports over 5,000 AV devices (cable boxes, DVRs, DVD players, etc) via IR and we’ve got many more in the pipeline. For Apple TV, you’d use the component pass-thru on a Slingbox PRO with HD Connect to remotely view, or listen, to your content. Our SlingPlayer software (computer and mobile) offers an audio-only mode, so we’re not just talking ATV video here… Select an iTunes playlist, switch to audio-only if you’d like (reducing bandwidth), and listen to your music anywhere you’ve got Internet. I don’t have anything to say on availability other than we’re currently in testing and it is coming…

Apparently the talk of CTIA was the Apple iPhone (MIA), though I seem to have missed it. In my circles, HTC’s new offerings (both big and small) and Helio’s Ocean generated the most discussion (and lust).

Some pics from the show… (more…)