Sling Media Begins Shipping Slingbox PRO-HD in Canada

ling Media, Inc., a leading digital lifestyle products company, has announced its next generation Slingbox™ PRO-HD is now available for purchase from leading online and brick and mortar retailers across Canada. The Slingbox PRO-HD is a revolutionary new product that allows you to watch and control your favourite HD content from anywhere in the world on your laptop PC or mobile phone.

First of its kind Slingbox capable of streaming both SDTV and HDTV; now available from Best Buy, Canada Computers, Future Shop and London Drugs stores nationwide/

The Slingbox PRO-HD is capable of streaming HD content from any home television source, including over the air HD digital signals (ATSC), digital cable channels (Clear QAM), HDTV cable set-top boxes, HDTV satellite receivers, or HD DVR’s, to a laptop or desktop computer in and around the house. Additionally, customers who have a high speed broadband connection that features upload speeds of 1.5 Megabits per second or higher, Slingbox PRO-HD can even stream HD TV signals outside the home to just about anywhere you can receive a high-speed network connection.

“With Slingbox PRO-HD, our customers will have the ability to place-shift their HD programming to a laptop or desktop computer both in and around the home or remotely while preserving the best possible picture quality,” said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media. “Slingbox PRO-HD marks a giant leap forward in hardware and software development from Sling Media including the powerful encoding enhancements that are a part of SlingStream 2.0. Because of this, Slingbox PRO-HD delivers picture quality at all resolutions that is truly amazing.”

With the availability of the Slingbox PRO-HD, Sling Media has also updated its SlingPlayer for Windows software for PCs running Windows XP or Windows Vista. SlingPlayer 2.0 for Windows is now available for download from Sling Media’s web site, www.slingmedia.com. SlingPlayer 2.0 for Windows features a live video buffer built into the software, allowing the viewer to pause and rewind a live video stream for easy navigation within a program, and avoiding potential conflicts with home viewers. Also included is the familiar ‘favorites’ feature which slides out of the SlingPlayer and gives users a fast and intuitive way to navigate to their favorite channels or select the most popular remote control commands without having to bring up an on-screen guide on their home set-top box. Finally, SlingPlayer 2.0 for Windows incorporates Sling Accounts, a single sign-on feature that keeps key personal Slingbox information including Finder IDs, favorite channels and programming guide information, making them all accessible on any PC running SlingPlayer 2.0 for Windows software.

Slingbox PRO-HD features SlingStream 2.0, a major improvement to the company’s proprietary SlingStream™ technology. SlingStream 2.0 allows the Slingbox PRO-HD to adaptively stream high quality television content across virtually any network connection. With SlingStream 2.0, audio/video quality is noticeably improved for remote clients operating in both high and low bitrate environments, including high definition players on a home network.

The Slingbox PRO-HD replaces the Slingbox PRO at the top-end of Sling Media’s Slingbox family and sets itself apart as it is the first and only Slingbox product that is capable of streaming video content at HD resolutions and delivers it to a HD-compatible laptop or desktop computer. The Slingbox PRO and Slingbox SOLO both down-convert HDTV sources to SDTV resolutions.

Slingbox PRO-HD is designed to meet the varied requirements of today’s multi-faceted TV-viewing households. The product includes support for both standard (4:3) and widescreen (16:9) video formats and features multiple integrated sets of audio-video inputs and outputs (Tuner support for HD Digital Antenna (ATSC), Analog and/or HD Digital Cable (Clear QAM) channels, S-Video, composite video, component video and both analog and multi-channel, 5.1 surround, digital audio (S/PDIF)) and features integrated looping outputs for each input. Slingbox PRO-HD transforms desktop PCs, laptop PCs, Macs and a wide range of smartphones into personal, portable TVs and builds upon the goals of the original Slingbox – to give consumers the freedom to view their home cable, satellite or DVR programming on a wide range of devices anywhere they can access the Internet.

Slingbox PRO-HD is available from leading Canadian retailers including Best Buy, Canada Computers, Future Shop and London Drugs. The Canadian SRP is $329.99 for Slingbox PRO-HD.

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