Technologizer

This is a long article. It’s technical and at times downright complicated. [I never knew I had attention deficit disorder until I started reading about media streaming devices. --Tech Edit.]

I know some of you are going to skipit. At the same time, I get e-mail kvetching that I’m not writing enough about technology. So there it is: I ain’t gonna satisfy everyone. And in a way, that’s the pleasure in doing my own stuff: I write for myself, sharing with you what gives me a kick in the pants, and take delight when some of you enjoy coming along for the ride.

Enough editorializing. Here’s my long, tedious, sometimes boring story about the new way to watch TV.
Continue reading this story…

Way back in January of last year, Sling Media–the inventors of the nifty SlingBox box, which can broadcast TV from your home across the Net to your laptop or phone–announced its second major project. The SlingCatcher, it said, was a new device that would flip around the Slingbox’s functionality, sending video in a multitude of formats from a PC across a home network to a TV. It got lots of attention.

And then…nothing happened. For a long time. But I met with Sling co-founder/CEO Blake Krikorian today, and am happy to report that the release of Slingcatcher, which Krikorian said turned out to be a more challenging engineering project than anyone expected, is imminent. It’s not exactly the box that Sling unveiled in 2007: It offers a wired Ethernet connection but not the Wi-Fi it was originally going to include, and costs $300 rather than the sub-$200 pricetag that Sling targeted. But it’s still an intrguing product, and one which–like the Slingbox–is unique.

Continue reading this story…