Long long ago (last year), in an office far, far away (San Mateo), Blake Krikorian (Sling Media CEO) had a vision wherein Slingbox owners could easily share clips from favorite TV shows with each other. We knew it was a good idea, but didn’t want to push to far forward due to industry relations, copyright issues, bandwidth issues, etc. Looks like they’ve come a long way in the few months since I left, and a lot of these issues got worked out, which is very exciting. They announced two major new things at CES 2007: SlingCatcher and Clip+Sling.
SlingCatcher coverage is fairly pervasive, and I’ll hold off on adding any commentary of my own until we get closer to product launch. Watch this video or read about it at Zatz Not Funny, Engadget, Crave UK, MobilitySite, or ShinyShiny.
For Clip+Sling I was able to attend Les Moonves’ keynote during CES, and recorded a video of the whole demonstration:
It was great to watch Blake up there, especially as Chad Hurley had been on stage as well. YouTube is definitely great for user-generated content, like the videos we all make with our cameras these days. It’s a real pain for most users, however, when it comes to TV content. Most consumers have no idea how to record video to their PC, or even worse how to edit down to the clips they want. I think Clip+Sling with a centrally hosted server launched in conjunction with CBS and other networks could be extremely disruptive in the online video space. I’m looking forward to the launch later this year.
More Clip+Sling coverage: Engadget, Laptop magazine, PVRWire, SlingCommunity, and Zatz Not Funny.
Disclosure: I am a former Sling Media employee and have some stock. In fact, I just found a couple of videos of me doing Slingbox demos with the nice people at BuyTV (and the Slingbox Pro too)
Also, I video’d the CBS “media” presentation during the keynote.