There is an article in the Sunday edition of The Hindu, India’s national newspaper, which is mainly a fluff piece on the Slingbox, due to the development work done in Bangalore. But the article ends with a couple of interesting bits:
He [Manish Singhal, general manager, Sling Media] said features to be introduced in 2008 included “Clip and Slingâ€: the ability to record and share portions of the content, with friends, using a few clicks; and “Slingcatcherâ€: the ability to download content directly from the Internet without having to use a PC.
The company is exploring the launch of the product in India next year.
I think this may be the first (semi-)official confirmation that the SlingCatcher has been delayed until 2008. It was originally slated for release late this year. This isn’t surprising, since we’re already into December with no announced release, and the general feeling was that Sling has simply tried to tackle too much this year, with several client projects, the Slingbox SOLO, and the SlingCatcher. But I don’t think Sling has ever officially announced the delay. The last we heard on the SlingCatcher was the packaging details leak in October. Clip+Sling we’d already had word would be out in 2008.
A move into the Indian market would be interesting for Sling, which has always had a fairly aggressive international expansion effort for a small company – and now they have the backing of EchoStar.
EDIT: Dave Zatz emailed me to point me at a comment he made over at Sling Community on November 20th. An excerpt from his comment:
The bottom line is that this is a new product category for us and the development effort has taken longer than we anticipated. However, once we release the SlingCatcher in early 2008, I’m confident you’ll enjoy pulling content from a variety of sources using the sexy and innovative GUI on your television.
The comment is on a post about a video interview by the Satellite Guys with Brian Jaquet if Sling Media in which me mentioned the SlingCatcher would be delayed until 2008:
So it looks like there were previous announcements of the delay, I just hadn’t seen them.
