Slingbox

One of the things that had been potentially concerning us about moving to NZ was the cultural shift from losing access to UK television (particularly the BBC and some of the sport). Now it does seem with the advent of the BBC media player (still pending for the Mac) etc that things wouldn’t be quite as scary as we’d feared, and many UK shows and sporting events do make it into NZ schedules, although riddled with commercial breaks. But just to be on the safe side we’ve decided to roadtest a Slingbox.

If you’ve not encountered Slingboxes before they’re – er – boxes and they – well – sling telly over the t’Interweb to a computer or 3G phone somewhere else in the world.

By hooking up a second Sky+ box at my parents house in Liverpool, and plugging this into the Slingbox, and plugging the Slingbox into my parents’ router, we can now watch or even remotely record anything we could see on UK satellite via the net. OK, we’re in London at the moment, so we could have just got our own dish, but if it works here it should work anywhere we can get a broadband connection. It’s pretty cool.

It’s even cooler watching on the 3G phone, although the picture is both teeny and weeny.

The only drawback I’ve found with it so far is that it’s very dependent on the available upwards bandwidth at the Slingbox end of the link, and most asymmetric broadband connections are very asymmetric, which means that a standard account with a very fast downwards connection is still relatively sluggish in the other direction. Which means we’re probably going to have to upgrade my parents’ account to get enough bandwidth for a good quality picture.

In the meantime, I’m watching the Liverpool/Chelsea match right now, and although the picture’s a bit ill defined I can see the ball and there are very few picture freezes or sound dropouts. So I’m pretty impressed.