Slingbox + Wireless + Camera = Disruption

Posted by Allan Tear on May 9, 2007

A local TV station in San Francisco that has replaced their expensive remote cameras - the ones that monitor highway traffic and beam it back to the station using old-style microwave technology - with an innovative DIY solution.

The news director wired together a Slingbox, a high speed EVDO wireless card, and a cheap digital video camera in a hard case. The result ? The TV station took their costs from $25,000 to $1000, and opened up a whole new world of possibilities for live TV broadcast in the field without bulky expensive trucks or signal feeds.

Currently, this is only possible in an urban area with high speed cell tower access. Combine an application like this with BIF's RI-WINs network, and you have an instant news network across the state. It changes the game for field reporting, but also changes the barrier to entry for creating news and programming.

Read on for an excerpt and a link to an good video summary.

From CNET News: The Slingbox is known best for its ability to let consumers watch their home TV channels remotely using a laptop or smart phone. But a local San Francisco news station has found a way to utilize the trapezoid-shaped set-top box to cheaply and easily deliver live news, traffic and weather updates wirelessly back to its studio. The news operations director at CBS 5, Don Sharp, devised a way to replace more than 20 of its cameras affixed to the tops of local bridges, freeways and buildings that use microwave technology to relay video back to the station with smaller cameras combined with a Slingbox Pro and a high-speed wireless EVDO card, at 800 kilobits per second.

Normally, news stations have to pay $25,000 for cameras to monitor traffic and weather, in addition to the cost of maintaining the units and renting the space for them. Compare that to a smaller camera for $500, a $300 Slingbox and $60 per month for each data card and it could potentially change the way broadcast TV news does business. That's especially true if someday all live shots were done with a small portable camera and Slingbox, since that could eliminate the need for gas-guzzling microwave trucks normally needed to broadcast breaking events.