Blake Krikorian, CEO of Sling Media, gave a tour of the Vegas strip in a Mercedes SUV, watching TV shows on handheld and laptop PC s while an associate drove the vehicle. No big deal, right? The trick is that he was watching shows being broadcast live to his home back in San Francisco and then zapped to his car wirelessly.
"Placeshifting," as Krikorian and others have dubbed this trick, was one of the new ideas at this year's CES, where more than 100,000 digerati flocked to see what's coming.
—David LaGesse, "So unconventional," U.S. News & World Report, January 17, 2005
Sling Media is preparing to ship a new device that allows viewers to "
placeshift" television. This means that consumers can choose to view whatever broadcast they could be watching at home, no matter where in the world they happen to be.
The Slingbox connects to any home entertainment system and can handle programming delivered via cable, satellite, over the air or stored on a DVR. It then sends the content to the consumer's choice of wireless device — a computer, a PDA, even in theory a mobile phone — by using the Internet.
—Chris Marlowe, "Convergence," The Hollywood Reporter, November 19, 2004
