My dad emailed me the URL for Sling Media
the other day in an effort to solve some of our general television dilemmas. I was thinking I should have invented such a device but was too dense to think of it.

Our problem is that we have a philosophical problem and a bit of a financial problem paying for television. He already pays for full cable TV at his house in Newton as well as a house in Marshfield. I barely ever watch television in Brookline except for times when there are major sporting events like playoff baseball or NFL Patriots games. So I don’t want to pay for television either. Unfortunately the free stuff in Brookline doesn’t work well because the big buildings bounce the signal back and forth causing ghosts to appear on the screen. I have even tried things like MLB.com but I learned that playoff baseball is not available on the web because of national broadcast restrictions. Hey television network dummies – if you broadcast it on the airwaves you should broadcast it on the net. You are selling ads anyways you nitwits.

So this Sling Media thing seems attractive to us. From my basic understanding of it the device grabs content from your television after it’s been output from the cable box and then streams it to the Internet. This would allow me to watch the same television program that my dad was watching on his living room television, like the Red Sox game. The tool also appears to be able to dig into Tivo programs and can change the channel so basically I would have a remote version of a cable TV box in Newton available wherever I wanted to view it.

I don’t know how long this will stay legal since there are some obvious re-broadcasting tricks that can be done with a tool like this, provided that the person doing so has plenty of bandwidth. For example – they could have one person subscribe to the paid movie stations or PPV TV and then broadcast it to a large number of illicit network subscribers. I can imagine that the Canadians, fearless satellite hackers converted because of silly broadcast restrictions in Canada, would be some of the first to pioneer Internet re-broadcast TV stations. The content would probably be porn from satellite stations like the playboy channel but it could evolve into more sophisticated stuff. All you would need is enough tuners or virtual tuners hooked-up from various folks and some organization around it all through a password protected web site. I’ll wait and see.

For now I think the demand lowered significantly for this device because the Red Sox got swept in three games. So all we have are the Pats and we usually gather for that.

Some other folks have taken notice of it on places like EnGadget. I also noticed that Commerce5, one half of my empire formerly known as ChannelWave is the direct sales processor for this gadget.