Edward C. Baig: Personal Tech - Slingbox sets your TV viewing free:

Posted By: Kirk Griffin

Edward C. Baig, USA TODAYThu Mar 23, 10:03 AM ET

It's made possible thanks to the Slingbox, a clever, $250, silver box about the size of a cigarette carton that you connect to a TV, satellite receiver, cable box or personal video recorder, or multiple devices simultaneously.

Unveiled last year by Silicon Valley-based Sling Media, Slingbox is modeled on a liberating concept called place-shifting - the idea that you can watch "local" channels or stuff you recorded on TiVo even if you are thousands of miles from home.

Place-shifting lets a New Jersey Nets hoops fan traveling out in the Pacific Northwest catch his favorite hometown team in action or check up on local news back home.

Until now, you had to use a laptop connected to the Internet to remotely watch your home TV or TiVo via Slingbox. Schlepping a computer, much less finding an Internet connection, isn't always practical. But folks almost always carry cellphones.

Starting Thursday, Slingbox owners can download free SlingPlayer Mobile software that extends the reach of the Slingbox to personal digital assistants and phones powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile Pocket PC operating system, including the Treo 700w I'm using.

On April 26, the software (still undergoing "beta" tests) will cost $30. There are no monthly fees, but your phone must have a data plan.

Tricky installation

Slingbox is a terrific product for TV junkies who travel. It works well on a laptop with a high-speed Internet connection. In my experience, using it on a cellphone is more hit and miss.

Before taking advantage of the latest Sling Media software, you have to get the Slingbox hardware up and running. You connect the Slingbox to your Internet router and hook up the necessary cables to your home TV or other gear. (I bypassed the TV altogether and connected Slingbox directly to my cable feed.) For $99, Sling Media sells a networking kit to transmit Internet signals throughout your home's wall plug sockets, useful if your router is far from the TV.

Installation can be tricky. Because my router doesn't have universal plug-and-play capability, I had to manually muck around with settings, not a friendly exercise. To its credit, Sling Media asks you to identify your router model and will show you detailed pictures to walk you through this painful process.

During setup, you must also enter a 32-digit "Finder ID" that tells the computer which Slingbox you are using. For security purposes, you must enter the Finder ID into the SlingPlayer or SlingPlayer Mobile software on every laptop, PDA or cellphone you want to use for remote access. Best advice: E-mail the ID to yourself and "cut and paste" it into Sling Media's software. You can only use one device at a time to watch.

To get the SlingPlayer software onto the Treo, I connected a USB cord and ran Microsoft's ActiveSync software. The synchronization (including automatic transfer of the Finder ID) appeared to go smoothly. But I kept getting a connection error when I tried to watch.

I called Sling Media to troubleshoot. We discovered that some of the required changes I thought I made to the router never got saved. After trying again, I could finally get TV on the Treo.

I suspect most of the problems from then on had more to do with the Treo than the Slingbox. The 700w connects to Verizon's high-speed wireless network, but coverage is spotty around my New Jersey neighborhood. I couldn't always connect to the TV, and when I did the video was sometimes jittery and slow moving. Moreover, the screen was barely visible outdoors.

I had better luck riding the bus in Manhattan, though I occasionally got a cryptic message about the player failing to load because of "device limitations." I had my best results trying out the Sling software in a terminal at the Newark airport.

Under ideal conditions, the TV started playing less than 10 seconds after I launched the application on the Treo. You can change channels and control other functions with a tiny onscreen remote control. Occasionally, the remote would not appear; Sling Media says this can occur when a lot of applications are running. The company says the problem will be addressed in the final software release.

You can also set up shortcuts to quickly access favorite channels. I sometimes encountered brief lags before a station changed.

If you travel into a poor coverage area, you can operate the SlingPlayer with just an audio stream, or in slide-show mode, crawling at just one frame per second. I suppose getting any feed from the ballgame beats no signal at all.

E-mail: ebaig@usatoday.com

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