My love affair with Slingbox

Guys who love gadgets are everywhere. There's nothing particularly special or interesting about a guy who loves the latest technology: they keep things like Wired magazine or this week's CES in business. By my passion for Slingbox is a bit deeper than just geeky interest - it's a downright love affair.

Slingbox is a small black and red box about the size of a copy of Atlas Shrugged that streams video from your TV or cable box to the Internet. And, of course they have an application for the iPhone.

My job in TV News gives me a few key uses for it. For example, part of my responsibility is knowing what we (and our competition) covered in the 11pm newscasts the night before. Slingbox allows me to watch those newscasts that I have saved on my cable box with my iPhone while I'm running on the treadmill at the gym. I can even stream them in the car and listen to them as I drive in to work.

The Slingbox gives our newsroom a vital capability as well: we can use it to stream our on-air feed to CNN during breaking news, which frees up other transmission resources for live feeds and takes the burden off our team to worry about feeding the networks and instead allows us to focus more on covering the story.

I'm not alone - in terms of utility in our newsroom the consultants, reporters and news director love it too. The consultants can use it in conjunction with minute-by-minute reports of who tuned in and out during the newscasts to try to draw connections between what stories were on air when people turned us off. The news director and executive producers can see how certain blocks flowed just after they went on the air, and whether there were problems with commercial breaks. Our reporters use it to see to watch previous newscasts and see how their live shots looked on-air and how they looked in the two-box with the anchors.

My favorite use for it is in the rare event we get beat on a story, we can see what our competition had that we didn't. Let's say they had an interview with a friend or relative we were unable to find - in the past you had to hope they'd re-run the piece or post the story to their website so you could start chasing that lead. Now we can pull their piece up instantly, jot down the super, and start chasing!

Of course, it's nice outside of work: if I'm stuck at the airport, or waiting for my car to get fixed I watch saved items on the DVR, or even watch live sports. Netflix and Hulu are nice and all...but there's no other way to watch a live sporting event on your phone without a Slingbox.

I can't think of anything else that's red and black that makes my heart race...unless it UGA victory on the football field.