Using Slingbox for ALL my TV viewing?

October 5, 2011 11:50 AM

I had an idea in which I set up a Slingbox on a spare cable box at my parents' house and watch it on the TV at my house, thus eliminating my own need to subscribe to cable. Is this crazy enough to work?

Having an extra cable box set up at my parents' house would cost around $10 a month. That would allow me to dump my cable bill and just pay for internet and stream live TV from their house to mine.

Would this work? It seems too good to be true...surely, someone's bandwidth would surely get throttled, or someone would catch on. Hs anyone used Slingbox as their primary source of cable access?

posted by moviehawk to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I do this with a standard Slingbox. I am not really picky about television but there are a few shows I'd like to watch if given the option. I have 3MB uncapped service at my house and this is enough for decent resolution but it can occasionally be draggy, laggy or drop into pixels for a few seconds. That said, it's absolutely inexpensive which is great for me since I don't care about quality, DVRing or other things. The big headache for me is that I have an ancient bedroom iMac that I used to watch this stuff on, but the newer Slingbox stuff only works through a browser [not a standalone app] so you have to have an OS that is less than a few years old. I can't imagine this would matter to almost anyone, but make sure you know what you're getting into going forward. Also I don't know much about cable, a second cable box allows you to watch a different program at the same time as your folks watch something else? If so yeah I'd totally go for it. The quality won't be great but it will be tolerable.
posted by jessamyn at 12:26 PM on October 5, 2011

I had an old boss that used it to stream TV at work in our office lobby, from his house (instead of just paying for cable). The only issues we had were that occasionally, the whole thing needed to be rebooted and you can't do that remotely. The quality was 'good enough'. We also had a T1 in the office which helped with quality, but I would assume it would only be good as the slowest internet connection which was at his home. YMMV. I wouldn't recommend it if you wanted fantastic HD viewing.
posted by getmetoSF at 1:21 PM on October 5, 2011