Just Sling It

The folks at Echostar have a vision and together with Sling Media and Dish Network they have a vision of bringing TV everywhere. Today we saw that vision come to life as Echostar and Sling Media held a walking press tour of its booth at CES.

The tour features John Paul from Sling Media and Mark Jackson of Echostar who gave us some important pieces to the puzzle they were making. Remember the uproar a few months back when Sling released its Slingplayer application for the iPhone? Many Slingbox owners were upset, as the iPhone app didn’t officially support the older Slingbox models such as the Classic. Many Sling fans were upset and Sling was not giving any answers of why they were doing what they were doing until today…

The real reason is Sling is partnering with Adobe and will soon be Slinging using Flash technology from its Slingbox Pro HD and Slingbox Solo receivers and using a new Slingbased software to watch the streaming television from the users Slingbox.

Now while this might not sound like much to most people, this is big news as now it now makes the Slingplayer application to anything that supports Flash 10.0, including Slingplayer support for Google Android phones and even a player for Unix based systems.

The Sling folks were happy to be the 9th highest grossing iPhone application in 2009, and said that the iPhone client was still of the utmost importance to them. They said they are trying to work with Apple and AT&T to allow users to watch their Slingbox units on their iPhones over the AT&T 3G Network.

At the press tour they also showed off the new OEM Sling products, which were announced early Tuesday morning. They showed off the new WIFI Television that actually looked really good, and also showed that it was possible to enjoy HD on a second television by using a Dish Network 922 DVR and a Sling Receiver 300. The Sling Receiver receives signal from the 922 over power lines and hooks to a customers second HDTV and gives them TV2 control of the 922 but transmits to it in full HD resolution.

In addition a new ultra thin Slingbox called the Slingbox 700U was shown, whats neat about this is you can plug it into the USB port of any Dish Network ViP receiver and it instantly gives that receiver full Slingbox features with no other wires needed.

This was Sling’s year to shine at CES, it seemed like the Sling booth had more room then Dish Network’s booth and most everything that was shown at the Dish booth was equipment from the Sling booth.

I got to admit I am an avid Slingbox lover and own quite a number of them, and I find it exciting to see this amazing technology going mainstream. Charlie Ergen has a way of seeing what’s coming down the line years before anyone else and his decision to buy Sling Media looks like it could soon be paying off in spades.

One of the other highlights of the Dish Network booth was a giant version of its “Why pay more for TV” capmapign, where two large TV’s were placed side by side one hooked up to Dish Network and the other hooked to DirecTV. A demo was shown that showed all the great things you could do with Dish Network receivers that you could not do with DirecTV’s. These video demonstrations drew large crowds and seemed to have people asking why the DirecTV receivers didn’t have those features. This CES might have converted a few attendees to Dish Network customers.