I’m happy to announce that Sling Media has shipped their first product, the Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, and that Walt Mossberg’s review of the Slingbox appears in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I’ve posted about Sling briefly in the past, here and here, and have been actively involved with the company as a board member since Mobius VC invested in them last October.
Since that time, the team managed to garner several awards at January’s CES and build some buzz, all while keeping their heads down in product development mode to meet an aggressive goal of shipping the product in the first half of 2005, which they did with a day or two to spare. You can buy a Slingbox online at CompUSA right now, or you can walk over to your local CompUSA store and pick one up off the shelves on Friday, with more retailers to be announced shortly. Congrats to everyone over at SlingMedia for a job very well done!
I may be biased, but I’ve been a beta tester for the past couple months and wouldn’t want to part with my Slingbox, which I’ve got hooked up to my DirecTiVo. Just yesterday, while at the office (hey, I’m a multi-tasker, what can I say), I managed to watch the last 15 minutes of Six Feet Under and also reactivate my Sopranos season pass using my laptop. And a month or so ago while in Pittsburgh, I watched the most recent episode of Entourage (which was sitting on my Tivo) from the comfort of my broadband-enabled hotel room. Pretty damn cool.