TV anywhere, anytime ...

When reading the article on TechCrunch about watching cable TV on your iPhone, brings me back to the vision of UMA - my first blog entry here. In fact, with Sling Media's Set-Top Box (STB) you can stream TV/video content to your computer within your house. Now they'll announced to approach mobile devices at this week’s Macworld:

SlingPlayer Mobile gives consumers their entire home TV experience, including local channels, local sports teams, video on demand, pay per view, etc. Any program that you can watch on your sofa back home, you can now watch via your iPhone using a standard network connection. In addition, SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone users can also control their home digital video recorder (DVR) to watch recorded shows, pause, rewind, and fast forward live TV, or even queue new recordings while away from home.

The application will be submitted to Apple some time in Q1 but on their homepage the SlingPlayer Mobile for Blackberry is already available as public beta right now - also for Windows Smartphone, Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Palm, and Symbian. Well, one could state that Apple's iPhone is the last one in the queue but I leave this debate open to everyone...

For me, this means that watching "my TV content" anywhere and anytime is becoming reality. However, I don't have a Sling Media STB and I also wonder about the legal aspects in European countries, etc. Furthermore, I would be interested whether it is possible to stream any content - not only TV content - to your mobile devices as film industry is starting to attach Digital Copies to their DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs respectively.