Review: Sling Media Slingbox

With broadband speeds on the rise, we are now beginning to see more innovative technologies to expand Internet use.

Creating plenty of interest is technology to enable watching TV over the Internet, and this week two products come out in the UK to help do just that: Sling Media's Slingbox and Sony's Locationfree TV box.

Looking a little like a silver-coloured gold bullion bar, the Slingbox lets you watch and fully control your home TV from anywhere in the world, provided you have Internet access with an upstream of at least 256kbits/sec.

It has been available in the US for almost a year, but Sling Media has adapted it, producing a Pal version for the UK (and mainland European) markets.

At £180 (and available only at PCWorld), it is roughly half the price of Locationfree TV, so will be more attractive to many who want this type of product.

It is aimed at anyone who wants to watch their home TV when on the move, such as business people who travel often, but will also attract those who want to watch their TV from, say, a home or office computer.

On removing the product from the box, the first thing you'll notice is that it feels cheap, taking you by surprise because the casing looks metallic but is in fact plastic.

Setting aside our initial disappointment, we used the quick start guide to marry our Slingbox to a Sky+ set-top box.

Pleasingly, it comes with all the connections you could need, including S-video, composite and coaxial leads, a Scart adapter, an Ethernet cable and an infra-red control cable.

Connecting the cables up correctly was pretty easy, although we struggled to get it to hook up to our wireless router properly and couldn't get it past our laptop's firewall software.

Sling Media does a pretty good job of talking you through problems and, while it took a while, we eventually sorted out the router, which was down to its Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP) option being switched off – once on, the two linked up on our third try.

Getting past our laptop's software firewall proved tougher to solve. Eventually we switched it off, relying instead on the router's firewall to protect us.

Setup took about an hour, and it was worth every minute, because suddenly we were watching Sky on a laptop.

Page 2: Watching TV over the Internet