Sling Media has garnered a lot of attention lately. The company’s flagship product won a number of awards at CES, including one of CNET’s Next Big Thing awards for 2005. For those of you not familiar with the Sling Media device, its “Slingbox” enables a user to watch your living room TV programming from wherever he/she is located by turning any laptop or Internet device into a personal television.
So, where TiVo has created the new category of ‘time-shifting’ video streams, Sling Media has created ‘place-shifting.’ Basically, the Slingbox takes the signal bound for your TV, and rebroadcasts and transcodes it across the Internet. Service providers have expressed interest to Sling Media about bundling their box with broadband as a remote video access offering.
While many service providers focused on bringing signals into the home, Sling Media is focused on the signals leaving the home. A classic application for this is a vacation home where it does not make sense to have a full $80 per month cable service plan when you can access the home programming via a high-speed Internet connection for half or one-third the price (and get Internet access for non-Sling applications too).
From a consumer electronics point of view, the $249 Slingbox is nothing particularly fancy – it has RCA audio, composite video and S-video input and output ports, as well as an RF/coaxial video port. An RJ-45 network port communicates with the home LAN. The box installs between the signal source (e.g., telco IPTV box) and the TV set. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Media Player 9 for encoding the signal, so it is compatible with any remote device that can read WMP encoding.
The flexibility of this approach enables users to use their existing devices to watch programming wherever they are, without having to install additional cards or software drivers. It’s also not dependent on a home host PC to drive the broadcast. The Slingbox provides full remote control of source devices in the home via an ‘IR blaster.’
The Slingbox is targeted at home DSL and cable modem users. In this instance, it gets stuck in the weak spot of many DSL and cable broadband services – upstream bandwidth. The end-to-end bandwidth required for the signal is really a matter of personal opinion and depends heavily on how the user wants to watch your TV. Obviously, a full screen on a PC requires higher bandwidth than watching it on a phone or a small window on your PC. In our experience with the box, a minimum of 256K bit/sec of bandwidth is required for a decent-sized video window, but a lot more is needed for full-screen viewing.
So where’s the opportunity for service providers? Companies like DirecTV already have service plans where vacation homes can be added for a mere $5 per month as an additional receiver. And Microsoft Media Center PCs and other programs enable you to burn a lot of recorded TV content to a DVD to take with you. And certainly there’s no shortage of DVDs to be purchased in any convenience store. So is there a market for remote TV?
We think so. It lies more in the markets that are not served by existing solutions. Want to catch that basketball game that’s on your TV but not in your hotel room? Or finish watching that show you started watching last night before you left home? Or access your recorded series on your PVR? These are harder to do if you did not plan in advance or are not willing to pay a premium wherever you are to try to access that content (Come on, we KNOW there are some sports fanatics out there who have hunted down a sports bar on a cold snowy evening to try to find a specific game being broadcast!).
Indeed, the installation of a Slingbox is simple. A Slingbox can be drop-shipped to customers and self-installed. The access remotely is equally easy – any device with IP network access, enough bandwidth and a compatible media player program can access the stream. The limitations are upstream bandwidth and compatibility with existing devices. The system comes with a means to quickly discover your home gear and get that set up, and the upstream bandwidth and prioritization – hey, what business is a service provider in if not bandwidth provisioning?
It’s not like Slingbox is without competitors – TiVo has announced TiVoToGo, for instance – and if anything, Sling Media is bringing attention to place-shifting as a concept as much as it is focusing attention on the product. We can envision any networked device reinventing itself to have the concept of rebroadcasting its local content added to its network connectivity options. The limitations here surely will be copyright and digital rights management issues. Sling Media says it is observing those now by only allowing one signal to leave the home – on the supposition that if you are not home, then all you are doing is extending your eyeballs a few thousand miles.
The real impact for service providers will be in the dollars and cents. Is this a market that is big enough to warrant adding new complexity to the home viewing environment? Is this better a feature of the set top box itself rather than a separate box? How much support is required to install this box into a system? These are some obvious questions that need to be answered and our experience with the system is too little at this point to draw some firm conclusions. But we saw enough to know that place-shifting makes sense, and it offers service providers the opportunity to bundle some additional remote access options to their bandwidth that could be optimized for this application – wherever it is housed. And we all know bandwidth providers are looking for incremental profitable applications. For telcos – who can perhaps use their wireless arms to even further extend the reach of a place-shifted system – this is just another weapon they can tuck away in their arsenal for their ongoing battle with the cable MSOs.
