The story of Slingbox

The new Slingbox Solo has a lower price ($180) than its predecessors and has built-in jacks for high-definition gear probably won’t mean much to you.

The Slingbox’s purpose in life is to transmit whatever is on your TV to your laptop or smartphone (like a Treo or Windows Mobile phone) across the Internet. The point, of course, is to allow people who travel — to another room, another city or another continent — to view all the channels and recordings that they’re already paying so much money for at home.

The new Slingbox Solo is tiny; its trapezoidal shape is meant to evoke the shape of a gold ingot, and it’s now about that size, too (9 by 4 by 2 inches). That’s about half the size of its predecessor, the Slingbox Pro.

(The Pro is still available, however — for $230, plus $50 for an accessory if you want to connect to high-def equipment. The Pro lets you connect up to four video sources — TiVo, satellite box, Apple TV, DVD player and so on — and switch among them by remote control. The Solo, as its name implies, connects to only one.

There are a few other ways to perform a similar stunt, but none with the Slingbox’s high video quality, super-simple setup and ability to display both recordings and live TV.

Tags: high def, place shifting, slingbox, Slingbox SOLO, TV,