Sling Media - Streaming TV to Portable devices

Forbes has a short write-up about an interesting upcoming product from startup Sling Media, called the "SlingBox Personal Broadcaster." If it works as advertised, we'll probably be hearing a lot about it.

The idea is simple: hook up the little $200 box to your TiVo or your cable box and connect it to your home Internet. Then, when you're out and about, just pull up the client software on your PDA or laptop. SlingBox's software will detect the quality and throughput of your connection and shoot you our a recompressed, digital stream of whatever analog signal you could be watching at home. It would even work on cellphones, they say, if the bandwidth were there (and it will be Real Soon Now).

The company plans to avoid a copyright-infringement suplex from the entertainment industry by limiting the remote viewing to a single stream at a time. We'll definitely keep an eye on this one - the term "place shifting" could become as widespread as "time shifting."

Read more on the company web site

- Mike