Pay Once, Watch Anywhere

I had heard rumblings and excited murmurings about this the last few months, but had not really understood what IT was until yesterday.

It, is a SlingBox.

What it allows a user to do, is to take any media they have in their home, or on their home media network either via hard drive, live cable, DVR or soon by IPTV and "Sling" it to any other device they have. Laptop in mid-air in Germany? No problem. Cell phone or PDA wherever you are (on a 3g or better network, of course), no problem.

What it means is that if a user has paid for or otherwise acquired content at home which, in my opinion, is probably the best place to choose what you want to see, they have to buy it or acquire it only once.

There's no additional monetization that comes from licensing different resolutions (a rather complicated set of thoughts I had earlier in this post, but I think this is probably the fairest thing I've seen for the consumer in a long time. It is absolutely fair use all the way.

And seeing as how the distributors these days continue to screw the content owners and producers anyway... it would sure be a lot easier for producers to sell their content to one place (at least in the case of SlingBox owners) and let the user and their system do the appropriate scaling rather than having producers shoulder that cost.

Cool gadget! Want One!