Review: Sling Media Slingbox

The TV stream is about seven seconds behind real time. Picture quality is pretty good, although it will vary depending on network traffic. In the home, we've had it running wirelessly to both a laptop and desktop PC.

It's a one-to-one technology, so you can only have it open on one machine at a time. But setting the software up on additional computers was very easy, taking only a minute or two.

The Slingplayer software will regulate the TV stream, to ensure it runs smoothly without freezing. Over the home network, we had the Sling Media screen maximised to 17in with no issues over picture quality. Sound does suffer a little, though.

Firing it up over the Internet from work, we could only occasionally maximise the screen – but it was still a good 9in or so in size, and very watchable.

A colleague on Computeractive is also testing the Slingbox, but with his 1Mbit/sec upstream speed, it was easy to see the difference in picture quality, so you will appreciate this more if your broadband upstream speed is faster than our 256kbit/sec.

Sling Media's software remote control is easy to get to grips with, and the media player can be customised with shortcut icons for often-watched TV stations or remote-control commands.

What really impressed, though, was the absolute control we had over our home TV, even when accessing it from over the Internet.

We were able to not only change our satellite channel, but also access our hard disk, and view, scroll down and play programs that had been previously recorded.

We could also set our Sky+ box to record a program via the Electronic Programming Guide (EPG), handy if you've forgotten to set up a favourite you just can't miss.

All interactive services also work so, for instance, pressing the red button when watching Sky News will call up the menu options, and you can read the written stories within the service.

Every option with the Sky+ menu system that we tried, worked.

Plus, you can pause, rewind and fast-forward live TV, just as you can when watching Sky+ at home.

Sling Media claims it is also possible to set up other devices, such as a DVD player. But since the Slingbox has only one input, you're unlikely to choose your DVD player over your Sky, cable or standard terrestial connection.

It also houses a Freeview tuner, which means you can watch an alternative digital TV stream while someone else is using satellite  on the TV.

We had some problems getting this to work initially. During set up, we kept being told the Slingbox could not find the Freeview signal. It turned out that the box was defaulting to an unavailable channel, and by ignoring the message we were able to fully set up Freeview and get it working properly.

Sling Media says it is now reworking part of its set up documentation, having not experienced the problem before.

Right now, the Slingplayer works only with Windows PCs, but Sling Media has plans to add Windows-based PDAs and Smartphones in the future.

Overall, the Slingbox is without a doubt one of the coolest products we've tested this year. We were equally impressed with the software media player and its ability to smoothly stream TV to a computer – be it over the home network or across the Internet.

It wasn't overly difficult to set up and, while watching a program via the Internet is not as good as settling down in front of your TV, describing it as 'better than nothing' would be an insult to the quality of service it provides.

Watch out for our imminent review of Sony's Locationfree alternative.

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If you've got a PSP it might be tempting, but we'd recommend opting for the cheaper Slingbox with its free software