Full Transcript:

Rich Buchanan: My name is Rich Buchanan, I am the Vice President of Marketing at Sling Media.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Alright, you got a couple of cool new products coming out at, being announced at CES, what are those?

Rich Buchanan: The first product we announced here at CES is the Sling Catcher. Number one request from our Slingbox owners is the ability to transfer their TV content, via Slingbox to another TV, rather than to just a laptop or a cell phone. So, think of the Sling Catcher as the Sling Player for the TV. Like you think of Sling Player on your laptop, except this is designed for a TV. It comes with the remote control, it allows you to change channels, do everything you would do in the living room, on any TV in another room around your house or for that matter, around the world.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, it’s like a Slingbox in reverse?

Rich Buchanan: It’s exactly the way to think of it , it’s a Slingbox in reverse.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What’s the I-O on the back of it?

Rich Buchanan: The products designed take in put, via the internet of course, preferably over your home line, so you have the highest possible speed connection and the out put on the back of the box is either, composite as component or HDMI.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, it can out put an HD signal?

Rich Buchanan: It can output on HD signal, that’s correct.

Benjamin Higginbotham: All the way up to 1080p or we limited to…

Rich Buchanan: 1080i.

Benjamin Higginbotham: 1080i, so 720p as well?

Rich Buchanan: 720p.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Okay and then how do I get that content from one, how do I push it to that box, is that coming from other Slingboxes or players?

Rich Buchanan: Coming from the other Slingbox. The second generation of Slingboxes that were introduced in October, are all capable of streaming it about 8.5 to 9 megabits / second now and through firmware advances, we will continue to push the envelope of how fast we can push data, from one Slingbox to another. So, this is how we are pushing the data from a high definition input in a Slingbox to another TV located elsewhere.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Even 9 megabits, that’s a pretty large pipe, that’s a lot of data standard definition DVD goes no higher than 8, today.

Rich Buchanan: Yeah, that’s right.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, you should be able to push in those are mpeg two, what codec do you use to actually?

Rich Buchanan: Right now we are using windows media codec.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, the VC-1.

Rich Buchanan: So, it’s a VC-1 style codec. The beauty of the Slingbox is it is GFP based and so we can change the codec’s that are used as codec’s evolve and change over time. We will work continually tuning and tweaking the DSP algorithms inside the Slingbox to improve performance.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Now, you’ve also announced little bit before CES, the PRO-version of Slingbox which allows the HD input via component HD.

Rich Buchanan: That’s right. The Slingbox-PRO was the first product designed to really embrace the HD world. So, we included a dongle with the product that’s called the HD connect, it’s a separately available accessory and it accepts component input, in stereo audio input and output. It’s how you get a HighDef up to 1080i signal into the Slingbox for compression and transmission.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And then what is the fundamental hardware difference between a Slingbox-PRO and the original Slingbox, is there or is it kind of the same thing, but just with the different I-O?

Rich Buchanan: With the Slingbox Pro is much more sophisticated front end, since we can obviously take up the 1080i. had to be a much more robust front-end to the DSP. It also required a much higher performance DSP in order to deal with much higher speed data, being provided into the front-end of the Slingbox ,such as the 1080i signal.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, what is the maximum resolution that can be pushed out of it or into and then out of Slingbox PRO?

Rich Buchanan: The resolution in is a 1080i, is the max. The output is totally depended up the available network bandwidth. So, we preserve the 16/9 aspect ratio of the signal, regardless of the terminal speed of playback. So, you could be outside of your house where you are frequently caped at 300 to 700 kilobits/second, you will still get your 16/9 aspect ratio, but it’s gonna be the more equivalent of 480p kind of image quality. Once you have gone through the codec process, it’s almost impossible to translate that to a true resolution. So, we start with full D-1 frame on the inside and more fitly scale, it to fit in to a D-1 frame, transmit the D-1 frame, because the codec’s utilizes the D-1 frame size for their input source and then anamorphically stretch it on the back end, and to get back to the full correct aspect ratio of the HighDef signal.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, if essentially coming in 1080i, so 1920/1080 interlaced and then old 720p or whatever your input is and then you are scaling that to D-1, I believe your 720/46 and then your scrunching it down and then compressing it to whatever it needs to be compressed at on the --- .

Rich Buchanan: That’s it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, if I am on cell phone its gonna, on mine what I need to do?

Rich Buchanan: May be 200 kilobits/second on a cell phone.

Benjamin Higginbotham: But if I on my home local area network, that’s a gigabit it’s gonna shoot whatever it can and then stretch that back out in the software?

Rich Buchanan: That’s correct.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So, I won’t be able to take my true 1080i in and out, I am going end up with 480p signal wherever I am?

Rich Buchanan: It’s gonna be similar to a 480p signal and quality. As we continue to improve the algorithm performance on the PRO, we expect to get more to 720p performance on the output side of the signal, that’s why we included the HDMI connector for the maximum possible resolution.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So that’s a software thing there, not necessarily hardware side?

Rich Buchanan: It’s a software thing, so for example bought the Slingbox on July 1st in 2005, the first day we shipped the product, we could only stream that product at that day roughly 800 kilobits/second. We’ve since improved that same product to now, 2.5 megabits/second, just with software optimizations of the DSP. So, we are now launching the Slingbox PRO at 8.5 megabits/second, we expect to push that well beyond that.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What about the reverse version…

Rich Buchanan: The Catcher, the Sling Catcher?

Benjamin Higginbotham: Are we gonna have the same limitations on that box or it different hardware or is it kind of hardware agnostics, they just passing the signal through?

Rich Buchanan: Its hardware agnostic, its passing the signal through, its doing a straight decode, so its garbage in-garbage out, high quality in–high quality out, so it’s a straight decode box. It doesn’t have any encoding capabilities and it’s got a gigabit network input, so you have got plenty of bandwidth on the front side of the box to get into it.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I believe that Sinclair’s are available now in major retail stores, the three new players?

Rich Buchanan: The three new Slingboxes are available in all major retailers in North America.

Benjamin Higginbotham: And then the Catcher?

Rich Buchanan: The Catcher is going to be available mid-summer, so look for in stores early August timeframe.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Do you have estimated MSRP on that?

Rich Buchanan: It’s going to below $200 and we are struggling how far below $200 we can get it, its trying to buy components in advance is a very difficult science.