Have a craving to watch TV in the office? You may not be able to set up a television in your cube, but you can watch your home TV over the Internet with Sling Media's $250 Slingbox Personal Broadcaster.
This slim silver box connects to your home network and allows you to change channels and watch TV or other video sources from afar. The Slingbox has composite, S-Video, and coaxial inputs (and works with cable/satellite boxes, DVD players, and digital video recorders like TiVo). It does not, however, work with high-definition video.
I installed the SlingPlayer software on my home PC to configure the unit, and again on my laptop so that I could watch video remotely. Then I attached my chosen video source. Once I entered an ID code into the SlingPlayer (so that it could locate the Slingbox over the Internet), I could access the unit remotely.
The higher the bandwidth you get across a network--be it the Internet or your home network--the better the picture will appear. I found the video and audio playback acceptable when experienced over a home network (at 700 to 800 kilobits per second). But the image had some obvious compression artifacts, and those artifacts became very pronounced when I tried to watch the video in the full-screen mode (which doesn't occupy the whole screen). The compression was much more obvious when I tried the product over a typical domestic DSL connection rated at a 300-kilobits-per-second upstream transfer speed: The video was jerky and heavily pixelated.
Although aspects of its software interface are inelegant, I nonetheless found the Slingbox nifty. It does what it sets out to do--enabling access to live TV, a DVR, or a DVD player remotely--with reasonable ease and success.
The Slingbox Personal Broadcaster has its uses, but its image quality may be disappointing unless you have an ultrahigh-bandwidth connection.
Price when reviewed: $250
Current prices (if available)
