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January 30, 2008

3 Cheers for Podomatic

There are times when we run into technical problems relating to our products interfacing with those of another company. Often a subtle form of fingerpointing or passing the buck occurs. So it was delightful to work with Podomatic, a popular free Podcast hosting service, today to fix a problem with Replay A/V accessing their Podcasts. With one call, I was able to locate the lead engineer, and in a few minutes we were able to access their entire library of Podcasts again. Yippee!.

Podomatic has a pretty cool service - you can start your own Podcast with just a PC, a microphone, and an internet connection. Just go to their site, speak your Podcast, and it's uploaded and added to their directory. And it's free. Pretty awesome.

Thanks again Justin!

Posted by Bill Dettering at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Technorati Tags: | Comments (0)

January 10, 2008

Clip & Sling II

A quick correction on my previous post regarding Clip & Sling. I went back to the main Sling booth again and learned the following:

1. You can record up to 2 minutes from any source without a content redistribution contract. However, your clips are only accessible to you.
2. All recorded clips are automatically uploaded to the Sling server. There is no local file storage for your own clips.

The concept of "fair use" is still foreign to these guys. By playing the content owners game, they are digging themselves into a hole for the future.

Posted by Bill Dettering at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Technorati Tags: | Comments (1)

January 08, 2008

Clip & Sling - The Ugly Truth

In keeping with my unhealthy obsession with Slingbox, I talked to a representative today here at CES regarding their "recording" feature in the upcoming SlingPlayer 2.0 called Clip & Sling. As we suspected, it's not pretty.

Turns out Sling has had to reach content redistribution deals with EVERY TV content owner on the planet for this feature. Each content owner must explicitly give Sling permission to record, and then sets the time limit - some may allow 15 seconds, some four minutes, etc. No agreement: no recording.

This is an INSANE amount of work for a feature with dubious value to customers. From our perspective it's great news, as SlingPlayer 2.0 will NOT have any significant recording options.

At-Large Recorder (and every other Applian product) is all about recording for personal use. You've paid for the content already, you can record it. Just don't redistribute it to others.

Posted by Bill Dettering at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Technorati Tags: | Comments (0) | TrackBack


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