SharkJumping

I received my Sling Box today ($219 at Amazon with no tax or shipping) and attempted to set it up.  just raised a $46M round of financing (from Liberty Media, Echostar/DISH, and others), and has won numerous awards for its hardware which allows you to use your PC (and soon, your cell phone) to watch your TV from outside the house, including accessing your DVR.  We don't have cable access in Tahoe, so I thought we'd give this a shot, and in any case, it's the geeky toy of the moment, so it was worth checking out.  The good news is that I have a fair amount of experience setting up digital media adapters, TIVO, etc., so I'm familiar with some of the more complex issues, but the bad news is that after 2.5 hours, I had to give up for the evening without getting it to really work.

I'll say that Sling Media goes absolutely out of their way to make it as easy as possible - there is a huge assortment of cables included within the box, the device is quite attractive, relatively small, and incredibly well labeled.  However the end result is that it's still too hard to ask average users to add yet another device to their AV stack, especially one which requires both connections to the legacy AV units such as your cable box, TV and/or DVR, as well as connections to your network router.

The first big issue is that you have to attach an IR emitter, the bane of many people's existence when adding new devices.  This is because you're asking the Sling box to control a legacy device (a DISH DVR since Comcast never showed up to install their system two weeks ago - see post), and the only way to do that is through an over-ride of the IR emitter on the DVR - it's not complex, but nowhere does DISH actually tell you where the IR emitter is on the front of the DVR, so it's a trial and error approach until you correctly place the IR device.

The rest of the AV set up is nicely laid out, but the second touch point is the router connection.  In my case I needed to move a secondary router into the home theater system, but it apparently conflicted with the primary router in the basement, so I had to go deep into the "Port Forwarding" section of each router's online menu to open up a port so that Sling could make it outside the walls - that's a lot to ask for most users, but I'm not sure how many have their primary router already near where the Sling Box will be connected, so this may be a common issue. 

So at this point I can remotely change the channel on the DVR, as well as turn it off and on, but I can't yet see any video or hear any audio - clearly not working.  This is not all Sling's fault since they have one of the best set-ups I've seen, but similar to the problems I've had getting the XBox 360 to work as a media extender with Windows Media Center, this process is sometimes just too hard due to the issues with connecting legacy AV devices to newer IP connected devices - or it could be just my incompetence   And you wonder why Best Buy is excited about the revenue potential of the Geek Squad...

Hopefully Sling's customer service can help tomorrow.