Wednesday, January 14, 2009

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!