Sling Streams iTunes Content To TV

Vitamin_Boy writes "Sling has a new product out, the 'SlingCatcher.' It sends video from the PC to the TV and does it for $200. Oh, and it works with iTunes. Will this undercut Apple's iTV? The Ars Technica article thinks it might: 'The SlingCatcher... is media-agnostic. It doesn't care what codec videos are encoded with, nor whether or not they have been purchased from an approved online store. It is designed to take video output and stream it, which means that you could use the SlingCatcher with video purchased from other online services, such as the iTunes Store or CinemaNow. In this way, the SlingCatcher may turn out to be a one-size-fits-all solution in a field populated with specialty products.'"

Comments

Or you could.. you know..

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a card with a TV-OUT? They're not exactly rare.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[complete loony]

Yes, but then you have to have your PC next to the TV in the lounge room. There are lots of things you wouldn't be able to do on your PC at the same time, unless you also buy a second sound card and have an OS capable enough to send the audio in the right direction. I'm guessing this product will also come with a remote and IR port, which again adds more costs to the PC solution.

Re:Or you could.. you know..

[Kadin2048]

If that HDTV only has HDMI inputs, and no analog inputs (DVI-I or VGA), that's a pretty lame television set right there. Given the amount of source equipment that produces various flavors of analog video, the world isn't ready for sets that only have digital inputs.

I do wish that I could find the engineer who thought that Y-Pr-Pb was a fair alternative to some sort of actual RGB-based interconnect (like, I don't know, everything else in existence that uses high-quality analog video, e.g. SCART and 5-pin RGBHV), and throttle them.

There's really no good reason why consumer video should be this complicated. It's mostly a result of a lack of widely-accepted standards and mutual incompatibility that doing something as seemingly trivial as getting a computer to display on a HDTV (which is nothing but a computer monitor with delusions of grandeur) becomes so complicated. Unfortunately, because consumers have become accustomed to such things being a PITA, they don't go running to the manufacturers with pitchforks in hand, every time one of them produces shoddy gear, as they should.

Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Going by the description it appears this would include streaming pay-to-view music videos and DRM protected DVDs. Is that a correct interpretation?

1a. If so: I assume it streams unencrypted/unencoded video signals rather than the data stream itself. What is to prevent me from plugging the receiver into my DV recorder?

2. Assuming the alternative, that it streams the original signals: How could an iPod magically gain the software to decode any stream?

Please enlighten me about how either alternative 1 or alternative 2 could be true in accordance with the 'it does not care about what codex you are using'.

why all the hoopla?

[oohshiny]

By now, there are half a dozen products that stream video from the PC, from the Web, etc. to your TV. I don't see why people get so excited about either the Sling or iTV--they are nothing new.

Re:why all the hoopla?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I don't see why people get so excited about either the Sling or iTV--they are nothing new.

For the same reason people got excited about the iPod when there was already the creative mp3 player line (and many others).

Advertising & Bling. Surely someone with your nick would understand ;-)

Strange Title on that Slashvertisement

[patio11]

I recently bought a new computer monitor, and it is iTunes compatible!!!1

No, seriously, we get it -- its an output device. It can output whatever the heck you want to the TV, be it iTunes or World of Warcraft or your Open Office spreadsheet (which probably makes for better television than half of the lineup). If it couldn't output whatever the heck you wanted, THAT would be news to the Slashdot "Egads DRM is choking us to death!" faction. And they'd be mostly right to be upset about that.

Undercut?

[Gord]

> Will this undercut Apple's iTV?

It's a bit difficult to tell since it's not even released yet, nor have many details been made public.

Will find out more at today's keynote I expect.

Re:How is this better than....

[bobintetley]

And if I read the article, I'd have noticed the big deal was DRMed crapola from iTunes.... that'll teach me.

Meme Alert:

[Zaphod2016]

media-agnostic
adj.

Without devotion to specific codecs, nor specific (approved) stores. Designed as a one-size-fits-all solution.

Current Google Index: 13,900.

I like this phrase. I love this concept. Here's hoping we hear it a lot more often in the wake of the recent BlueRay/HDDVD debacle.

Upstream capacity of WAN connection is the killer.

[Kadin2048]

It's not clear to me how much bandwidth is required on both ends, though.

Well, that's not hard to figure out. If you want to watch DVDs via your internet connection, you better be able to put through around 5-6Mb/s, and that's assuming that you have some sort of transcoder that can filter out the unnecessary stuff and pass along only the video and audio stream that you want. The DVD spec allows bitrates up to 10.08Mb/s, if memory serves, including all subs and various audio streams, but a typical commercial one is much lower for the parts you'd actually need to transmit.

Now, if you have a computer on the transmitting/media-server end that's cable of transcoding the video into some more modern format than MPEG-2, then you can probably start talking about live streaming on a 1Mb pipe. You wouldn't get HDTV, but you could easily push passable 720x480 MPEG-4, at say 800Kb/s for the video and 128Kb/s audio, for a total of around 930Kb/s before adding in your protocol's overhead. So basically, a 1MB/s symmetric connection would probably work.

It's certainly possible with today's technology, unfortunately, most U.S. broadband connections aren't up to snuff. A lot of folks are on connections that only give them 128, 256, or 512 Kb/s upstream speeds (e.g. even Comcast's premium cable service only offers a paltry 384 kb/s upstream speed with 6Mb/s down, or 768kb/s up with 8Mb/s down). With buffering you could probably make some of those connections work, but I doubt it would be a hit with consumers -- you wouldn't get the same 'instant start' that you do with locally-stored videos (because of all the buffering).

For the next few years at least, media sharing of the kind you're talking about (where you keep all your content on one system, and dole it out to front-end systems for display), is going to be pretty much a LAN phenomenon.

Sometimes not that easy...

[Kadin2048]

True, but as I recently found out to my chagrin, quite a few big-name (Compaq, I'm looking at you) don't let you install additional video cards. I had an old Celeron system that I wanted to use as a frontend STB, so I picked up an old $20 PCI-based video card with an S-Video out. Unfortunately, I didn't think to check the BIOS: there's no way to disable the onboard video and use an aftermarket card. (With the card in, both outputs just give a black screen.) Apparently this is not uncommon in low-end systems. In my case, it meant that I just had to get a new Socket 370 motherboard that didn't suck so much, which these days is another $20 junk-bin part, but it turned a simple drop-in upgrade into essentially rebuilding a computer.

Sometimes the obvious solutions have unanticipated complications; there's a whole lot of consumer hardware out there that won't "play nice" with anything. For non-technical people, buying a new box may be simpler than upgrading anything they have.