UPDATE: Slingbox came yesterday and was hooked up for trial run by last night. 

But then again, all he had to do was get TV on his computer and I would have been convinced! What do I know?  But he tells me he can run one satellite feed to computer through Slingbox and the rest of the house can get feed off of other satellite dish.

The picture was amazingly clean. No pixelation, some shadowing on fast action, but very very watchable!  Pretty cool.

I had only heard a little about the name, I didn’t read much because I knew it wasn’t anything I would use. Slingbox is owned by Dish Network. We can’t figure out where the mass market is for this gadget.

We came up with a few, but they still don’t seem to be mass markets:

• Sports teams fanatics – but you have to know someone in the market that gets all the games that are broadcast locally but not nationally. This is SIL’s application.
• Road warriors – if there are appointment TV programs you have to see, using Slingbox allows you to access them once you make it to hotel room.
• Getaway homes – no reason to have dish or cable at the getaway home, when you have Slingbox.
• Outdoor warriors – if you want to watch the game, but just get overwhelmed by guilt because it’s a great day, you can move outside with your laptop.
• And the piece de resistance: you can hook up your cell to Slingbox, during your commute!

Apparently content providers are OK with this because it’s one computer only that can access the Slingbox.

It still seems like a technology in search of a market. If you build it they will come?