Placeshifting know-how, which entails viewing and listening to reside, recorded or saved media on a distant machine over the web or a knowledge community, is pretty exceptional in India. Sling Media Inc., a completely owned subsidiary of Echostar Company introduced the launch of Slingbox in Mumbai at the moment, a product that falls underneath the placeshifting tech class.
Sling Media unveiled a spread of client digital merchandise similar to Slingbox 120, Slingbox PRO-HD, SlingPlayer and SlingLink which promise to counterpoint your TV viewing expertise throughout numerous screens. Slingbox acts as a medium between your TV’s set-top field and gadgets like your laptop computer, pill, media-player or cellphone (principally any machine that may be linked to the web) and may beam the TV content material onto these gadgets. It means that you can watch and management reside TV content material from a cable field, satellite tv for pc receiver, DVR or video digicam on any distant machine similar to a cellphone, laptop computer or pill situated anyplace on the planet through broadband web connection.
The Slingbox accepts TV supply enter and can be linked to your private home community router. You’ll have to set up the SlingPlayer in your machine (laptop computer, pill or cellphone) which is able to use your private home community (in case you are at house) or surrounding WiFi or wired web community (in case you are exterior your own home) to beam your TV content material onto these gadgets.
There’s a catch thought. You’ll be able to solely view one lively stream at a time. Contemplate these two eventualities:
a) Your TV in the lounge is OFF, however your set-top field linked to the Slingbox is on. Then you’ll be able to view your TV channels in your laptop computer / pill / cellphone as you’ll on a TV and alter channels accordingly, utilizing your private home community.
b) Your TV in the lounge is ON, then the machine configured with the Slingbox will solely be capable to see what’s being performed on the TV. As set prime containers are restricted to a single tuner in India (one TV per set prime field), due to this fact you can not view a unique channel in your cell machine from the one that’s at the moment in your TV.
Which means that you can not watch your IPL matches, whereas another person in your own home is watching ‘Balika Vadhu’. Additionally you can not concurrently play your TV content material in your laptop computer and different cell machine. It needs to be your TV laptop computer / pill / cellphone. After we requested him about this limitation, Bhupen Shah, Founder and CTO stated, “We can’t stream the content material concurrently on a couple of machine, as that will quantity to broadcasting and that isn’t honest on the content material authors.”
The Slingbox gadgets include composite ports, part ports and a LAN port. There’s a USB port as nicely, however as of now you can not join your onerous drive and stream media from it. You’ll be able to join your HD media participant or Blu-ray participant to the Slingbox PRO-HD machine alongwith your TV supply in. You’ll be able to watch content material off the saved media machine, whereas another person is watching TV in your own home. The person interface has a digital distant management from which you’ll function your media as you’ll on your private home TV. Sling Media have fed the distant management codes from all the favored Direct-To-Dwelling suppliers.
On being requested how totally different SlingPlayer for cell is from the Cellular TV supplied by numerous 3G service suppliers, Raghu Tarra, MD Sling Media, stated, “Within the cell TV possibility supplied by cellphone service suppliers, you need to purchase their packages, and you might be restricted by their alternative of channels. In case of the SlingPlayer in your cell machine, you might be watching content material that you’ve already paid for. You would not have to purchase a separate cell TV plan as such. You might be simply watching your TV on the cell display.”
The MRP for Slingbox PRO-HD, which might stream excessive definition content material is Rs. 14,999. Slingbox 120 can stream normal definition will set you again by Rs. 7,999. The SlingPlayer software program for cellphones is promoting at $29.99 (approx. Rs. 1350). Along with these merchandise there was SlingLink, which is a primary community adapter which lets you create a Slingbox community over your present house’s electrical wiring. SlingLink was priced at Rs. 4,999.
Whereas the product is nice for house use over your private home community, we felt that exterior your own home, you might be restricted by bandwidth of the web connection you’re going to get. On the cell phone platform, Sling Media is banking closely on the 3G know-how, however once more the person should bear the information expenses for the streaming. The pricing we felt was on the upper facet, and the least they may have performed to sweeten the deal was bundle within the SlingLink free of charge.
Let’s face it, in most house setups, the TV supply is situated in the lounge whereas your router is in one other room. One strategy to join the Slingbox to the router shall be by transferring the router in the lounge and use a WiFi dongle in your system or WiFi in your laptop computer. Different different, which appears aesthetically disastrous is connecting a LAN cable out of your router (in your room) to the Slingbox in the lounge. So shelling out Rs.4,999 for a instrument which is able to assist ease the connectivity mess, appears a bit too excessive.
Summing up, we shall be keeping track of the patron response to this product. Preserve a watch out for our overview of those two merchandise within the close to future.
Specs
Slingbox PRO-HD
Community Bandwidth:
HD Video: 1.5 Mbps or increased
SD Video: 600 Kbps or increased
Cellular Video: 150 Kbps or increased
Helps audio and video sources like: Cable TV STB, Digital Cable STB, Digital Video Recorder, DVD participant/recorder, HD Part enter help with reolution upto 1080i, Satellite tv for pc receiver, Video/safety digicam, Home windows Media Middle Extender
Slingbox 120
Community Bandwidth:
SD Video: 600 Kbps or increased
Cellular Video: 150 Kbps or increased
Connects to at least one SD composite video supply similar to: Cable TV STB, Digital Cable STB, Digital Video Recorder, DVD participant/recorder, Satellite tv for pc receiver, Video/safety digicam, Home windows Media Middle Extender
The merchandise shall be obtainable at retailers like Croma, Reliance Digital and on-line shops like Flipkart.com by the tip of the month in Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and NCR areas.
