The Slingbox looks neat.

Check out Sling Media. Their Slingbox product looks pretty sweet!

I totally buy into "place shifting". Tivo pioneered "time shifting" by allowing you to watch TV when you want. Sling allows you to watch TV where you want.

There are 2 things stopping me from buying one of these today:

1. No support for HDTV

2. No support for multiple tuners (I don't think my housemate would be very happy when I remotely change the channel through an IR blaster)

Ideally though, I'd also like to see:

- Place shifting integrated into existing devices (cable boxes, Tivo, Media Center) as a feature rather than requiring its own additional hardware

- Wireless support (I'm lucky that my wireless AP is near my cable box, but most people probably aren't in this situation)

- As little 3rd party software as possible (Content available via a web server, etc - also leads to platform independence)

- An API

Also check out this interview with Sling's CEO.

And while we're on the topic of TV technologies - why is there still no decent recommender system in place for TV? Why hasn't anyone tied TV into social networking apps? I want to see what my friends, family, and people with generally similar interests are watching. Every interview/demo I've seen of the future of TV talks about these features as being in the pipeline, but isn't it possible now? Why is TV still completely isolated from the Internet -- not just in terms of distribution (IPTV) -- I'm talking about the metadata. There is no technical barrier standing in the way of enabling these scenarios today.