The makers of Slingbox place-shifting TV device “Sling Media” announced yesterday that they are building a cool version of its SlingPlayer software for the Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch, Macworld were one of the first to get a private preview of this software (The lucky sods).

It is said that Sling is not yet ready to ship the software this month when the iPhone App Store will debut but will indeed be showing the awesome version of SlingPlayer which will be running on a jailbroken Apple iPhone near the Moscone Center this week during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). At the moment SlingPlayer is now available for PCs and Macs and other mobile phone platforms which include Symbian, Palm and Windows Mobile, it connects those devices with Sling’s Slingbox hardware so that the devices can display live or prerecorded TV across the Internet, one example shows a Slingbox that is attached to a TV connection in San Francisco which can relay a local team’s baseball game to the iPhone of a fan waiting for a air flight in an airport terminal (Pretty cool ah).

Product Marketing & Product Management Ted Malone (Sling Vice President) said that Sling is actually developing two versions of the player, one version is on the current version of the Apple iPhone software using the jailbreak tools to write the software and the second version is an iPhone simulator using Apple’s official development tools. By developing both platforms the firm’s programmers have been able to learn so much about Apple’s handheld-device platform officials said.

All the above is good if you have a “jailbroken” iPhone and although Sling is messing around with the jailbroken version of SlingPlayer and is right now a good way of characterize the performance of the platform. The shipping version of SlingPlayer will only be available for you to buy via the App Store. We are covering everything to do with the 3G iPhone which is being spoken about today at the WWDC this week, and of course anything else to do with the iPhone, Sling Media is sending three of its developers to WWDC this week. Hopefully the software will work well over Wi-Fi connections.
In the demo we saw, both an iPhone and iPod touch were able to connect to several Slingboxes via a Wi-Fi network and play back video, albeit with some hiccups that were to be expected from an extremely early development version running on a modified iPhone.

Source — Macworld