One recent Saturday, I was at my my in-laws’ vacation house. I sat down this Saturday afternoon with intent of watching the University of Oregon Duck football team play. My in-laws have cable TV, but their cable package doesn’t include FSN NW, the station the Duck game was being televised on.
In a moment of disappointment, I sent out a message on Twitter about my despair. Friend and follower Brian Westbrook reminded me about Slingbox [he reviewed on KOMO-TV here]. I had WiFi, just no access to FSN. After downloading the software and entering some quick configuration information, I was watching the game within minutes! It was amazing to be able to watch the live game from my MacBook Pro.
To this point, I had heard of SlingBox, but never *got* the utility of the concept behind the technology. Being able to watch TV from my cable box from wherever I am is a powerful use of Internet technology.
I look forward to being able to review and experiment further with Sling. When I get the opportunity, I’ll report back here, of course. 🙂
Does anyone have any related Sling stories? I look forward to the comments!
Slingbox is very cool but annoys my family at home when I change channels on them and upload speeds pretty crappy from my DSL so I started using http://parkmytv.com which is a ‘hosted tv’ service for place-shifting devices. I sent them my box and for $49/mo I now have super fast bandwidth ie. video quality, no channel conflicts and free reboots if it locks up. It’s a beta currently but accepting limited new customers, was lucky enough to get in and lovin it.