SlingMedia's Slingcatcher now available

For £199.99

9 October 2008 13:14 GMT / By Katie Scott

We got a hands-on with SlingMedia's Slingcatcher device way back at the end of September, but today, it hit the shelves in the UK.

The Slingcatcher sends content from your computer or a hard drive to your TV, as well as from TV to TV when used in conjunction with a Slingbox on a LAN or WAN connection.

And if you use the upcoming Slingbox PRO-HD - this could include HD content.

The device is priced £199.99 and is available in the UK from Amazon.co.uk and Micro Anvika as well as via SlingMedia's own website - the link for which is below.

Make sure you check out our video quick review of the device too.



Comments

  • I recently started using http://parkmytv.com to host my slingbox giving me MUCH better video quality since they dedicate outbound bandwidth (better than my home dsl) to me plus I no longer annoy my wife by changing channels on her mid-stream when I'm traveling :) I got in to an early trial I think they are still accepting sign-ups... Posted by Daniel, USA
  • Compressed HD video is about 13 to 14 Mbps, depending on your cable / satellite provider, and OTA HD is about 19.3 Mbps. So your Internet connection won’t be able to download HD video, as most providers max out at 10 Mbps.

    I tried the SlingCatcher, although on a local home network. The SlingCatcher was only connected to a 20″ non-HD TV. No frames were dropped when I streamed it over the home network. I used D-Link’s Powerline connectors to connect the SlingCatcher to my router over my home electrical network, while I had a direct connection between my SlingBox Pro HD and the router.

    But the picture did look grainy at times. For instance, when watching Leno last night, Leno’s suit was pixelated beyond belief. But other parts of the set were fine, and when other things were shown in the same broadcast, everything looked great, including the Headlines segment - I could read not only the headlines but the main text of the article without any problems. Commercials also looked non-grainy during Leno. So basically it was only Leno’s suit that looked bad.

    The overall picture is a bit softer than my cable source on the same TV, but it still looks very good when there are no artifacts introduced.

    I’m not sure if I’m going to keep everything at this point. It is nice to have my satellite box accessible upstairs without running RG-6 cable throughout the house, but this isn’t a cheap setup, and I’m not sure how HD will look on a home network if I do upgrade my TV upstairs to HD.
    Posted by Fred, USA

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