Slingplayer for iPhone coming soon, but when?

Last week at MacWorld, Sling Media finally demonstrated the SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone and it looks very good. They have a good demo running on their website now, but little to say about when it will be released. The site says they will submit for certification with Apple in 1Q.

I suspect this media push is a strategy to get Apple motivated to approve the player. I spoke with Blake Krikorian, the recently departed founder of Sling, last fall. He told me back then that the app was nearly complete, but that they were facing resistance and foot-dragging from Apple. We sometimes forget that the iPhone isn't an open platform. If for some reason Apple doesn't like your app, even if that reason is that they feel threatened by it, they can refuse to release it. So we'll all have to see what happens, and how quickly.

Meantime, I continue to use Orb, which provides me with a pretty good mobile TV solution, as I described in a previous posting. I have experienced intermittent problems with it since my last posting, but I have it working fairly reliably. I stand by my comment that while cool, Orb isn't yet mass-consumer ready.

My son uses the AT&T Mobile TV service on his Samsung Eternity. This is a surprisingly good live TV service. The feature I like best is almost instant channel-changing. The quality is good, and the interface is surprisingly good. I wish there was a broader channel line-up, and I wish it didn't cost $15/month. Bring on the Sling!

We all know the Internet has changed everything. Next, its going to change your TV habits, big-time. But how?

I love reading stories that claim to know what is ahead. I always wonder how they make their predictions. Like this one from ABI research, reported on Engadget: Internet Media viewing on TVs set to surge by 2013. I, for one, don't know yet how Internet-on-TV will unfold. But I agree it will be a big phenomenon, and fairly soon.

Last week on NPR, there was a great 7+ minute story on the topic, during prime drive-time. This phenomenon is certainly starting to move from tech circles to consumer circles. I can't make a ton of predictions, but what I do know is the following:

• There has been an explosion of TV-related Internet content over the last 18 months. Suddenly, Internet stuff actually belongs on your TV. Building on YouTube's start 3+ years ago, the entrants over the last year or so have been mainly commercial sites, and they are good. Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Joost, Veoh, ABC.com, Comedycentral.com are just a few that I watch. Even YouTube now has full-length commercial content, and a lot of it. Of the bunch, Hulu has gotten a lot of play in the press, and according to Neilsen, they broke into the top-10 website providers of streaming videos mid-last-year. I am a loyal user.

• Netflix and Amazon.com have booth been very aggressive at winning deals to get their services built into boxes-near-your-TV, and built right into new TV's. XBox, TiVo, and Roku are among the boxes to announce services to bring Netflix or Amazon content to your TV.

• TV's are still selling, even in the recession. According to DisplaySearch, total global sales were up in 2008, to an astonishing 205 Million units. And they are predicted to be about flat in 2009. Which means, the transformation to digital, flat-panel TV's continues to be the biggest phenomenon in consumer electronics, by far. Those millions of mostly high-def TV's can render high-res Internet experiences very well. And consumers, having just invested in them, will be anxious to put them to good use. According to Nielsen, TV is still where Americans spend their time. TV use actually grew to 127 hours per month last year. Make no mistake, the TV is still King.

• At this year's CES, Internet-on-your-TV was one of the big topics. I saw Internet-enabled TV's from LG, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Sharp. LG, in particular, seems fairly committed to the concept (meaning, they were actually demoing it in the booth rather than just showing it). Some of these solutions were plain aweful. My partners and I laughed out loud in the Sharp booth, in a not-good you-gotta-see-this way. There's a brief round-up of Internet TV solutions at this year's CES here.

As for me, I'll go on record. I don't like stuff built into my TV. A lot of TV's don't even have tuners anymore. I don't even use the speakers built into my main TV. We feed our TV's their content from a finite collection of boxes, such as a cable-box, DVD or BluRay player, and sometimes a game console, and I think it will be a while before that changes. That's because our TV's outlast these other gadgets and we don't want to be stuck with outdated stuff built into the TV. I think Internet content is much more likely to be popularized by one of the existing external boxes, or by an additional box, than as a proprietary feature on your TV. A built-in TV feature, by the way, will work differently on one brand of TV vs. another, and thus never achieve any kind of scale in a fragmented TV market.

Intel and Yahoo have decided to collaborate on a strategy to bring simplified Internet Widgets to your TV, with some consistency across brands. Called Widget Channel, I saw several demonstrations of this at CES. There's a nice story here on CNET that discusses the strategy. I like Widgets, and it is an appealing notion that they could emerge as a standard that developers can count on, to bring Internet experiences to TV in a simple form. We'll just have to watch and see if they take off.

I can't tell if Intel and Yahoo are really behind this thing or not. They had people on the floor demoing it who really didn't understand the technology, and they weren't pushing the platform very persuasively for developers. Maybe it is "early days". Or, maybe Intel and Yahoo are only "somewhat" committed.

While I like the idea of the Widget channel, much is left undone. The best Internet experiences are pretty powerful, and I don't see most TV's having the computer processing power to render 3D web experiences in real time. Little gadgets on the TV will probably ultimately let people down. In my experience, every time people are given the choice between the "real" Internet and "little pieces" of the Internet, people choose the real thing. Widgets are pieces.

If Internet-on-the-TV is going to take-off, there needs to be a new controller strategy. People are accustomed to the full control they get from a mouse and keyboard. There needs to be a way to give them this level of control over Internet experiences on a TV, without introducing a mouse or a keyboard into the living room. Today's solutions use things like on-screen keyboards which are so frustrating to use that I want to throw something at my TV.

In our house, we have a very quiet, very power-efficient PC hooked up to our TV. I handle all of the system maintenance, so the rest of the family gets a very easy-to-use always-on PC experience. If the whole thing was simpler, and never required bootups, backups, patches, updates, wizards, anti-virus programs, and what-not, I'd be much happier. We have a variety of ways to control our TV's PC, and none of them are ideal. My favorite full-sized TV-room keyboard is this one, which sells under a variety of brand-names. I have tried a bunch of them, including the Logitech DiNovo Mini, which is nice-looking but very difficult to use due to a flawed mouse-pad. I'm also using the very clever AirMouse app for iPhone, and I keep waiting for their promised update with such necessary things as an esc key (as in, the key that gets you out of full-screen on Netflix and Hulu), so its not a solution I can recommend yet. I'm told the update is coming any day.


Having the Internet on TV has really changed things for our family. I find myself not recording stuff anymore. Our DVR is rarely used. All the stuff we want to see is just a few clicks away without having to bother with a DVR. We have good family times watching clips together on YouTube and Hulu. Previously, the kids were squirreled away with their laptops in another room. So in a way, having the Internet on our TV has brought our family closer together. If that doesn't spur a phenomenon, I don't know what will.