Sling Media announced late Monday that it will release an iPhone client app for its Slingbox line of place-shifting video players by the end of March, as well as offering support for high-definition video streaming for Mac users for the very first time.
According to Sling Media PR director Brian Jaquet, the company will submit its iPhone app to Apple during the first quarter of this year. Jaquet showed me an alpha version of the SlingPlayer for iPhone, which unlike the version it showed in June uses Apple’s official development environment rather than a hacked version of the phone.
The player lets you watch live television from your home TV setup, streamed from a Slingbox over the Internet to your Wi-Fi or 3G connection. You can change channels and issue remote commands to your DVR, even playing back recorded shows.
Sling will be showing the iPhone version of SlingPlayer at one of its two kiosks on the Macworld Expo show floor.
In addition to the iPhone news, Sling announced that its online streaming site, sling.com, will support the Mac by the end of the quarter via a browser plug-in that will let Mac users connect to their Slingboxes and play back videos directly from the browser. This plug-in will for the first time allow Mac users to connect to Sling’s recently-released Slingbox Pro HD product and view the video in high- definition. (Currently the Mac version of the SlingPlayer client application can only view Slingbox Pro HD content in standard- definition resolutions.)
In addition to providing in-browser access to video streamed from Slingbox hardware, Sling.com also provides an assortment of licensed videos from third-party video producers.