Sling Catcher was officially – and finally – announced for British telly fans yesterday, and we’ve seen it in action, but despite being stuck in development limbo since early 2007, it looks like Sling might need to go back to the drawing board on a few things. Read on for our first impressions…
We saw all of the tiny Sling Catcher’s skills in action. It hooks up to a telly and grabs a feed from a remote Sling Box. But it feels slightly like this should have been included in the original streamer anyway, even if the new box gets the job done fine.
The Sling Catcher also plays back video files from a USB key, and even upscales them to 1080i, before blasting them out via HDMI.
We noticed a few problems with the Sling Catcher’s Sling Projector function, however. It streams PC and web content into your living room, but while it buffers the feed to keep playback continuous, video was choppy when blown up on the TV, to say the least.
Sling initially blamed the hotel’s Wi-Fi set-up (and even too many people in the room), but when it comes to customers using the Catcher, unless you’re lucky enough to live in fibre optic-tastic Ebbsfleet in Kent, chances are your broadband won’t be up to much more.
Fortunately though there’s plenty of scope for Sling to update the Catcher’s firmware, and given their positive attitude in tweaking the Sling Box over the years, hopefully they’ll be able to swat any bugs eventually. But wouldn’t you rather they had dealt with them already?
Out TBA | £TBA | Sling Media
