Next up in the dead pool: Slingbox
Congratulations to each and every member of Sling media. You’ve worked hard, got a product out the door, have lots of fans and generally have done well as a start up.
But nothing says success like seeing the words “Sling Killer.” Just think, in a relatively short period of time, you’d joined up with the likes of RIM (Blackberry Killer), Lotus/IBM (Notes Killer), etc.
Michael Arrington, who writes TechCrunch, is attending a Microsoft briefing and reports on fun stuff with the Media Center. A small quote that caught my attention:
“Anyone using Windows Media Center to record television (I do) will also be able to remotely control their media center to add/remove/edit recordings from any computer, via their passport account and a live.com gadget. We saw a demo of this today and its going to be pretty cool.
Note that this is not an annoucement for “remote viewing”, although there are heavy rumors that this is the next step, and it seems pretty obvious. That, of course, will be bad news for Slingbox.”
Michael didn’t actually use the phrase “Sling box Killer” but, for sure, it’s coming. Oh, wait, there are 672 Google references already. Way to go Sling. You are off to a good start but will need some extra effort to match the 25,000 blackberry killer hits on Google.
I guess if I want to disrupt the VC business, I need to get the “Venture Capitalist Killer” hits up there.
Hmmm ... they've just done another round.
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2006/01/sling_media_doe.html
Posted by: Rob Hyndman | January 27, 2006 at 22:47
Having had a demo of TiVo and SlingBox combined while visiting a friend in LA (and keeping in mind TiVo is not "officially" available in Canada so I had no prior exposure to it), I would say the SlingBox/TiVo combination at about $700 is somewhat cheaper than a Windows Media PC at $2,000+. And gives, say, over 75% of the uesful features available in Windows Media PC for managing the TV. And the combo is probably much easier for the average consumer to use; my friend gave an example where, as opposed to VCR's, SlingBox is not left reading "12:00".
Can Microsoft design a low cost consumer product to fit into this market without getting hung up on adding features that 90% of the consumer public would never use? As part of a beta test of a new product I have just had occassion to visit several business offices where I installed some software onto office PC's and provided some training. None of them had even changed their screen resolution from the default of 800 x 600, yet all the monitors were capable of 1024 x 768 at a minimum. Since one criteria for our product is ease of installation by the end user we need to ensure our product smoothly "slides" onto the users' PC's, we had to re-spec our product as a result to fit 800 x 600 monitors.
Posted by: Jim Courtney | January 28, 2006 at 07:43
Last line of first para above should read: '... my friend gave an example where, as opposed to VCR's, **TiVo** is not left reading "12:00".'
Posted by: Jim Courtney | January 28, 2006 at 07:46
funny that i came across your post right after i went to cnet. first thing i see on the front page of cnet is "Scoop: Sony's Slingbox Slayer?"...fortunately, the article was quite favorable for the slingbox.
reading your post couldn't be more timely. thanks :-)
never thought about measuring success this way...perhaps i can sell it to my investors ;-)
cheers,
Blake
Sling Media
Posted by: Blake Krikorian | January 31, 2006 at 00:06