SlingCatcher Delayed To Later In 2008

Posted on Thursday, April 10, 2008 by MHA

On Wednesday, Engadget and CNET each published an email from Sling Media Vice President of Sales Gregg Wilkes, sent in reply to a user’s inquiry about the SlingCatcher, the company’s planned hardware receiver to accompany the Slingbox line. Mr. Wilkes says the unit will not ship in the second quarter of this year, as the company announced at CES earlier this year, but sometime later in 2008. Here’s an excerpt:

Will the catcher ship in Q2? No. We are upgrading the user experience and making enhancements to the feature set. These may or may not all ship at the same time.

Will the Catcher ship in ’08? All indications point to this happening in 2008.

The SlingCatcher hardware, which first appeared at the 2007 CES and was shown again at CES ’08, will provide a way of watching your Slingbox from another TV, as opposed to the SlingPlayer software, which requires a computer and fast network connection; it can also bring online video to a television. See Engadget’s post or the Crave post at CNET for the full user email and Gregg’s reply.

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About MHA

Mark H. Anbinder is a computer specialist, food critic, hockey fanatic, whisky aficionado, hobbyist photographer, and technology writer based in Ithaca, New York. His words appear in 14850 Magazine, TidBITS, Mark_TV, and Macworld, and in the strangest places. He has owned an improbable number of TiVo DVRs over the years, and is currently down to three.
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  • Ivan

    I hope SlingCatcher is the project they put MZ on, so they could finally get it out of the door! I’ve been hearing about it for a long time, so I really hope that, while they are working on software (which is what I assume is causing the delays), the hardware doesn’t become outdated and the box uses latest chip sets.

    P.S. I also hope that Sling listened to SC preview feedback and will allow straight-up network streaming instead of having to sync with attached HDD.

  • http://www.gizmolovers.com/ MegaZone

    Sorry Ivan, I’m Beta Manager for SlingPlayer Mobile, at least that’s my first assignment. I’m just getting up to speed and I’ll be taking over the various SPM betas for the releases that have recently been announced, such as the SPM WinMob updates, the Symbian S60 update, and the Symbian UIQ release (which is new).