Slingbox for Remote Feeds

CNET has a video about our neighbor KPIX 5 . KPIX is using the consumer Slingbox for remote feeds. These sell for around $120 and basically take a video input and will stream it to another computer over the internet. They are putting these in cars and driving around for traffic shots. Looks like the video is being streamed to the internet through a cell phone data connection.

Slingbox was designed to let folks watch their TV's at home from any computer or even mobile devices that can connect to the inernet. It's interesting to think of another low-cost internet technology being used for broadcast video. Apple's iChat does a decent job of streaming video to another computer. But with Slingbox you don't even need a host computer to stream the video. I also recently wrote about a Windows streaming software Orb.

Slingbox recently released a Mac client called SlingPlayer that will let you receive the stream from a SlingBox on a Mac. The interface will recreate the remote for a device like a TiVo and allow you to control that device from the client computer.