By the end of the year, SlingMedia is planning to have a PocketPC client for their
SlingBox product. This means you can watch your own home tv signal wherever you have wireless connectivity and a Pocket PC!
If you are new to the basic idea of SlingBox it's simple:
1) You buy their box for about $250 and hook up any video input to it. Like from cable tv, or your Tivo, etc.
2) Enable it on your wireless network
3) Anywhere you have access to a computer with internet access, inside your home or outside your home, you can receive the streaming video. Apparently, you can even control your Tivo or cable box and change channels remotely.
Currently you need a Windows PC with internet access. But the natural and exciting extension of this technology is to have a Pocket PC client to watch TV on your wifi capable Windows Mobile device.
Apparently they have already demoed the Windows Mobile client, so it's close. In fact, they are reporting in the
support knowledge base that "We’ll support the Windows Mobile platform by the end of the year. Watch our website for announcements."
As far as other clients they say that for Mac/OSX "We don’t have any official announcement yet. Watch for news in the next few months." And for other operating systems "We are currently doing research to determine which software platforms we will port the SlingPlayer to. We have requests for PalmOS, Linux, Unix, and even Commodore 64! While we can't promise the latter, we are definitely looking into supporting other operating systems as soon as possible."
The cool thing is you have full control and you get to watch the content you've already paid for. No payment for each show or channel and no monthly subscriptions. The only real limit is that you can only watch on one device at a time. The reason for this is to make sure people aren't buying this product to mass re-broadcast content.
In my opinion, this is the sort of future we should be aiming for with regard to mobile video. To keep content viewing under the consumer's control is protection from price gouging that can happen when the wireless carriers, for example, have enough control over content distribution to make you pay not only for bandwidth, but for every bit of content that you view whether you already have access to it or not.
It's probably a bit early to see this sort of product be overwhelmingly successful in the marketplace, but its glory days may be just around the corner!