Back in January, I discussed an upcoming Sling app for the iPhone. Sling Media makes products
that allow you to watch your home TV or DVR in another location by
streaming the audio and video over the Internet. Connect a Slingbox
(different models range from $180 to $300) to your home entertainment
system (Cable, Tivo, DVR, etc.) and then you can watch live or recorded
TV using a laptop anyplace else in the world as long as you have an
Internet connection. You can sit in your hotel room in the West Coast
and watch your local news or sports being shown on your TV on the East
Coast. At the beginning of this year, Sling was previewing an iPhone app that allows you to use a Sling device to take anything on your TV and watch it anyplace else in the world on your iPhone screen. It is a neat idea, and I wondered why it took so long for the app to appear in iTunes.
Apparently part of the answer has to do with negotiations with AT&T. The app was finally released today for $30, but there is an important restriction imposed by AT&T: you can only use it to stream your TV signal over Wi-Fi. No use over 3G. I suppose I can understand AT&T’s concern about the Sling app using a lot of bandwidth, but is this really a unique concern? After all, only a small number of people own a Sling device whereas tons of people stream video to an iPhone from YouTube and hundreds of other websites throughout the day. Why single out Sling? AT&T’s answer is that the Sling app violates its data plan Terms and Conditions.
Well let’s read the contract. The Terms and Conditions, available here, include this language (emphasis added):
uses for Intranet browsing, email and intranet access are permitted by your data plan, there
are certain uses that cause extreme network capacity issues and interference with the network
and are therefore prohibited. Examples of prohibited uses include, without limitation,
the following … (vii) software or other devices that maintain continuous active Internet connections when a
computer’s connection would otherwise be idle or any “keep alive” functions, unless
they adhere to AT&T’s data retry requirements, which may be changed from time to time. This
means, by way of example only, that checking email, surfing the Internet, downloading legally
acquired songs, and/or visiting corporate intranets is permitted, but downloading movies using
P2P file sharing services, redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers,
web broadcasting, and/or for the operation of servers, telemetry devices and/or Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition devices is prohibited.
So AT&T says that you can’t use the 3G service to redirect a TV signal to a PC. Okay, but that has nothing to do with the iPhone, right?
Wrong, says AT&T. In a statement reprinted at Engadget, AT&T says: “Applications like [the Sling app], which redirect a TV signal to a personal
computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service. We
consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that
they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.” Note that you can use other smartphones from AT&T to watch Sling TV such as the Blackberry Bold, the Pantech Duo, the HTC Fuse and the Palm Treo 700p. It’s just the iPhone — unlike all of those other devices — that AT&T considers to be a PC because of its hardware and software. [UPDATE: There is an excellent CNET article with more information on this story, and AppleInsider has an in depth review of the app.]
I’ll be the first to agree with AT&T that the iPhone is in a class by itself and is far more powerful than those other smartphones. But I find it curious that AT&T sees the need to equate an iPhone with a PC to justify restrictions. It should be said, however, that AT&T’s decision to limit the Sling app to Wi-Fi might make sense on a practical level. Jason Snell at Macworld has used a prerelease version of the Sling app on an iPhone which had no restrictions, and he says that when using 3G the “quality was severely degraded and there were numerous hiccups in the connection, requiring long pauses for rebuffering.”
To avoid any speculation, let me say this loud and clear: this site will never, ever, be renamed PC J.D.
Click here to get SlingPlayer Mobile ($29.99): 