Blake Krikorian talks about the Slingcatcher, isn't worried about Apple's iTV
Reuters chatted with Sling Media co-founder Blake Krikorian about his company's latest trapezoidal gadget, the Slingcatcher. The Slingcatcher, which should drop sometime in the middle of the year, is sort of like a Slingbox in reverse: it's designed to stream video from your PC to your TV, rather than from your TiVo or cable box to your PC. Sounds more or less like all the other digital media adapters out there, right? Yeah, well Krikorian says that the space is "littered with dead bodies" and that problem with all those other products is that they're "giving consumers a subset of the Internet video experience they're looking for." He doesn't sound too worried about the one product that a lot of people will see as the Slingcatcher's main competition, either, saying that along with most of the other options out there that Apple's forthcoming iTV doesn't offer the "Internet video experience in an uncompromised fashion. Maybe it will connect to the iTunes service, or a couple of different Web sites that have been reformatted for the TV, or certain videos in formats and not others. That's one major reason why they fail." The Slingcatcher won't be limited at all, he says, and will let you take "anything you have on your laptop, any type of media, any Web site, or Web-based video and project it wirelessly at the push of a button onto your television set. I can go to any site, any video content, any formatted content and get it to play on my big screen TV. That's a huge difference between what we're doing and what others are doing."
