Another day another job. This time it was quite interesting! A fellow who has a holiday home (yes I know, a holiday home in in your Manchester!) called me up. He lives in Asia and misses all the great things UK TV has to offer. I don’t blame him, I’ve been to Spain on holiday a few times and the T.V. choice is poor, I won’t even mention what the US channels are like!
Well he purchased a slingbox. It’s a device that you hook up to your sky TV /DVD/Freeview. The other end of the slingbox goes to your broadband router. What the box does is pull the TV source (sky in his case) convert it into a digital form that can be sent around a home network or the Internet.
I’ve heard about these devices before but this was the first time I have seen one. At first I thought, what’s the point? Then it clicked, you can access TV from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection.
Anyway the customer is happy, I managed to configure the slingbox so that it can broadcast outside the home network. This allows him to fire up the sling player on his laptop in Asia and watch AND control his sky box in in your Manchester.
He almost had it set up by himself the only thing he got stuck on was port forwarding on the router, this ain’t simple and took me a good couple of months to fully understand. I use port forwarding all the time for remote access into computers but the slingbox also requires it.
So I’m fully qualified in setting up slingbox’s. If you’ve got one (they are currently only £60 from expansys.com) and are having “issues” let me know.
I’m thinking of buying one for myself now and giving my brother and father access to it as they live in the states. Best of all it has an inbuilt freeview tuner so I cvould just hook up to my router and leave them to use it. Nice Christmas present for them 