Earthling

Convergence is the much-hyped coming-together of broadband internet and home entertainment technologies. It's the idea that your television, web surfing, and movie watching could all happen on the same device, or as part of the same overall experience. I think I first heard the term back in 1998 as I entered graduate school. It was all hype and snake oil back then. We're a lot closer to making it happen now, but it's still not close enough to really understand how it could work. The panel discussion I attended about broadband to the home touched upon some of the challenges to figuring out convergence.

The Slingbox

The Slingbox from Sling Media, which was one of the most talked-about stories of CES, will help me illustrate the ideas of place-shifting and disruptive technologies.

Simply put, the Slingbox is a device you connect to your television and your home broadband network. It allows you to remotely control and view your home television programming on a laptop computer anywhere in the world where you can get a broadband internet connection.

• It's place-shifting in that it lets you decide where you want to be when you watch it. It unleashes your television signal from your living room. Just like TiVo lets you choose when you watch your favorite shows, and even take them with you as stored media files, Slingbox lets you carry your cable box around with you in the form of a laptop and a broadband connection.
  
• It's been called a disruptive technology because it creates a new way to make use of an existing product. It's piggybacking on something you already have and pay for, and finding a way to make it better. Up until now, the cable television companies didn't worry about how to allow their customers to shift place and time. Slingbox is making them think this way. If they don't, they miss out on a new way to make money, and risk falling behind other content providers.

At CES I spoke to Richard Buchanan, VP of Marketing for Sling Media, about some of its uses, net neutrality implications, and how they send updates to their customers.

Uses
The most obvious use I could think of was for people who go on lots of business trips, and for sports fanatics. It would be great to know that you could take your full local programming with you anywhere you go. But Buchanan explained that it's also helping families separated by long distances share the same experiences. He shared one anecdote where a military family taped their kid's baseball games, and used Slingbox to let the father watch them while stationed in Afghanistan. Each of the Sling Media employee business cards have a different Slingbox use on the back. The one I got for Buchanan says "Watches 'The Big Lebowski' at the Bowling Alley'".

Net Neutrality
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fear that ISP's will start blocking or hindering your ability to use the content and applications of your choosing over your internet connection.

If there's software to sniff out Voice Over IP(VOIP) packets, I wondered if there are similar technologies out there to sniff out Slingbox video packets, so that a hotel's ISP might choose to block your ability to use it while you stay there. Buchanan said he hadn't heard of such technologies yet, though there's always the chance that it's around the corner.

If you know of any cases where this is happening, let me know.

Upgrades and Updates
It's likely that the content providers like cable and satellite television companies will find a way to incorporate Slingbox's technology into the service they offer. When that happened with TiVo, it didn't affect your ability to buy and use your TiVo separately. My only fear with Slingbox is that the content providers will make their own, and then try to block your use of the regular Slingbox. I asked Buchanan how long he thinks I'd be able to use a Slingbox at home if I bought one today. He said that he sees it as a pretty long term product -- at least 2-3 years -- and we talked through a comparison to the TiVo.

He added that the company can extend the life of the Slingbox by updating the software and firmware regularly via install packages that are pushed to the consumer. It sounded like a pretty easy process -- they add a flag to the interface telling you that an update is ready for download, and then when you accept it it downloads and installs on its own.

It's XP-only for now, but they recently announced that a Mac OS version of the Sling player would be available in the second quarter of this year.

If you'd like to know more about the Slingbox, Om Malik has been covering the company since its launch on Gigaom.com, and Julia Layton broke down the inner workings on How Stuff Works.