Technology: You can take it with you
Time and space may have seemed constant once upon a time. But we've been fiddling with time—at least in terms of TV scheduling—for decades by recording shows in order to watch them later. Now we can also mess with space, thanks to a new "place-shifting" device called the Slingbox that lets you watch the shows on your living room TV from just about any broadband-connected laptop or PC.
About the size and shape of a gold brick, the $250 device plugs into almost any video source. I connected mine to my ReplayTV box, which is a digital video recorder like TiVo, so I could watch live TV or recorded shows. I then plugged the Slingbox into my home network, where it delivers video and sound to any Windows laptop or desktop PCs on my network that's loaded with free Slingbox software. Or I can watch the ReplayTV on a distant PC as the Slingbox, yes, slings the video across the Internet via my home's broadband connection—meaning I get Cardinals' games and St. Louis newscasts when I'm traveling. The picture quality is better than most streaming Internet video, if still not great, looking a bit grainy at its largest size (about a 6-inch diagonal on my laptop). And sound would sometimes get out of sync with video across the Internet.
But you can control the video source, in my case the ReplayTV, from the road—it was easy, for example, to use the Slingbox to set up shows to record back home. There is a free Web service, by the way, that can do much the same thing at orb.com, but its TV source must be a PC running Windows XP that also has something called a tuner card, which enables it to display basic cable or broadcast channels.
Slingbox installation can be tough if your network's router is old, which can mean futzing with "port settings" and other geek stuff. You also have to wonder how long Hollywood will allow it—shows and movies slipping across the Internet for free makes studios nervous. But for now, it's encouraging to see TV freed from the now-quaint limits of geography.