Jeff Pulver took the excitingly generous step of giving away Slingboxes at VON this year. And so, for the very first time in 16 years of tech conferences, I actually ran around to all of the booths on the exhibit hall bingo card and collected the necessary stamps.
When I got home, I opened the box. I was surprised by how simple the instructions and components were from a consumer perspective, and I assured my husband that we'd be up and running momentarily. Unfortunately, I was wrong...the Slingbox presumes that your cable runs into a set-top box, TiVo, or the like. At our house, however, our very-basic cable runs directly into our cable-enabled television set. With this setup, the Slingbox requires that you use a cable splitter so that your cable signal can be shared between the Slingbox and the TV. Given that we didn't have a spare splitter floating around, this means that everything went back into the packaging. I was particularly frustrated by this since the box did include an impressive amount of cabling that you might otherwise need.
Round One: The user lost. Round Two will commence whenever I get around to a Fry's or Radio Shack to get the ^$%*&&^ splitter. I'm surprised that a splitter was considered too expensive a component to include in a $249 retail package, or perhaps Slingbox is only targeting the early adopter set with TiVos. In any event, the Slingbox will sit and collect dust until I get around to picking up the splitter (three weeks now and counting)....although hopefully, Round Two will end with me watching TV on my home office desktop.
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