Family and Child, health and pharmacy

REVIEW

OK, it has happened: we're officially old. When you sheepishly tell your children that you used to have to watch TV shows by sitting down in a certain place at a certain time - well, you know you are old.

First came the TiVo and its ilk, eliminating the bit about sitting down “at a certain time.” Then came the Slingbox from Sling Media, which obliterated the need to be “in a certain place.” Later, SlingPlayer Mobile software for cellphones even wiped out the part about “sitting down.”

Of course, the Slingbox is not nearly as famous as the TiVo; you may not even have heard of it. In that case, saying that the new Slingbox Solo has a lower price ($180) than its predecessors and has built-in jacks for high-definition gear probably won't mean much to you.

In that case, a primer is in order.

The Slingbox's purpose in life is to transmit whatever is on your TV to your laptop or smartphone (like a Treo or Windows Mobile phone) across the Internet. The point, of course, is to allow people who travel - to another room, another city or another continent - to view all the channels and recordings that they are already paying so much money for at home.

It comes in handy when you want to watch TV upstairs and your fancy high-definition TiVo is downstairs. It is also great when you are in a hotel room, bristling at paying $13 for a movie. And Slingboxes are also a blessing when you are overseas and longing for the news, or the sports broadcasts, of your hometown.

There are a few other ways to perform a similar stunt, but none with the Slingbox's high video quality, super-simple setup and ability to display both recordings and live TV.

The new Slingbox Solo is tiny; its trapezoidal shape is meant to invoke the shape of a gold ingot, and it is now about that size, too (11.5 by 3.5 by 9.2 inches, or 29 by 9 by 23 centimeters). That is about half the size of its predecessor, the Slingbox Pro.

The Pro is still available, however - for $230, plus $50 for an accessory if you want to connect to high-def equipment. The Pro lets you connect up to four different video sources - TiVo, satellite box, Apple TV, DVD player, and so on - and switch among them by remote control. The Solo, as its name implies, connects to only one. For most people, that's the TiVo, satellite box or cable box.

If you are the kind of person who is terrified by the tangle behind your TV set, the setup is no joyride. For anyone else, though, it is not bad. You plug your video source into the Solo's inputs: component cables (for HDTV gear), S-video or composite cables. If a video source has only one output - a cable box, for example - you will be grateful that the Solo also has outputs that pass the signal on to your TV. In other words, you can wire the Solo in between your cable box and your TV.

You must also connect the Slingbox to a broadband Internet connection. For most people, that means connecting the Slingbox to a home router. This may be the stickiest part of the installation, since your router is probably in the basement, closet or office - not next to the TV. And the Slingbox is not wireless.

At this point, you could buy a really long Ethernet cable and thread it through the walls, from Slingbox to router. Sling reports that some people have luck with wireless transmitters, but it recommends its own SlingLink Turbo powerline transmitters ($80 a pair). They use your home's electrical wiring to carry network signals. You just plug one SlingLink into an outlet near the TV, and the other near your router. And presto: network jacks where they need to be.

Finally, you run the setup software on your Mac or PC. It is supposed to be effortless and automatic, but I wasn't so lucky; the setup software told me that my oddball router would not permit automatic configuration. (It's a Linksys, probably the most popular brand on earth. Some oddball.)

Fortunately, the company's Web site (SlingMedia.com) offers step-by-step instructions for dozens of router models, mine among them; unfortunately, the illustrations didn't match the hideous configuration screens that I was seeing. Nonetheless, it was enough help to guide me through changing some parameters like IP Address, Port Range Forwarding and Service Management. When it was all over - 20 minutes - I was watching live TV on my laptop over my home's wireless network.