Slingbox Setup, Round One

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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Comments

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[Jeremy Toeman]

Hi,

Sorry to hear about this, but your thought that we didn't include it because of the assumption that early adopters would have cable boxes (or more) was a correct assumption. While I realize this left you out in the cold, and I hate the fact that your out of box experience was less than ideal, our early research has shown that most Slingbox owners today are using non-coaxial sources.

That said, we are always keeping our eyes glued open as Slingbox awareness grows, and as we reach wider audiences, this topic is something we'll definitely reconsider in the future.

I sure hope you can find one soon, I have three extras sitting in my closet I could send you! :)

Best,
Jeremy
VP, Market Development
Sling Media

[S Newton]

Get that lazy, no-good husband of yours to get off his butt and get you a splitter :)