Broadcast News

Remember when you had to be home at 8 p.m. to watch a favorite TV show? Devices like TiVo and your cable company's digital video recorder changed all that. Then along came the Slingbox, a device that lets you watch your home DVR or cable box from anywhere in the world using your laptop and an Internet connection. More than 500,000 Slingboxes have been sold since they were introduced in 2005. But like many disruptive technologies, the device is being used in creative ways that its manufacturer, Sling Media, never imagined.

Originally designed for personal viewing, the Slingbox has been transformed into a global online broadcast platform by individual users and a handful of crafty companies. With a practice known as Slingbox hosting, owners of the boxes are charging others in different cities and countries access to their Slingbox video feeds. For a monthly charge of about $100, subscribers get the original owner's Slingbox ID, download the free Sling software, and voilà—a New Yorker could be watching the local news in Los Angeles or London. Sharing is especially popular among sports fans who use sites like slingboxsharing.com that provide a forum for owners to trade their IDs with users in other states. That allows a Knicks fan in Iowa, for example, to watch live Knicks games that may not be broadcast outside of New York.

Then there are companies like techwareit.com and a2btv.com that both allow homesick Americans living overseas to watch U.S. television over the Internet. For as low as $99, plus the cost of a cable or satellite TV subscription, they'll wire up a Slingbox so that international customers can watch American must-see-TV from anywhere in the world.

"Slingbox gives people the ability to essentially become a rebroadcaster of content, and sort of become their own cable company," says Michael Gartenberg, a tech analyst at Jupitermedia. "We are living in a global society and people want to watch the Yankees, even if they're not living in the New York area or the United States."

While they're popular with users, the Slingbox's manufacturer, Sling Media, is not pleased. The company says these practices violate its license agreement, which states that users may not lease, lend, rent or otherwise distribute the software to any third party. The company has banned all Slingbox sharing and hosting posts on its official message boards, warning customers that the use is illegal. "Hosting Slingboxes and sharing finder ID's is prohibited by our End User License Agreement," says Sling Media spokesman Brian Jaquet. "And we don't condone any violation of copyright law." But will it take legal action to stop unauthorized uses? "No comment," Jaquet says.

Not surprisingly, cable and satellite TV providers are also up in arms, underscoring that unauthorized rebroadcasts of their content are illegal. "Our acceptable-use policy, which every customer agrees to, is pretty clear about what you can and can't do with your cable subscription," says Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley. "And the majority of [these uses] fall outside of the acceptable-use policy."