Sling Media and Symbian partner to bring personal TV home viewing to consumers
The Symbian Smartphone Show, London, UK– 17 October 2006 —
Sling Media, Inc., a digital lifestyle consumer electronics products
company and Symbian Limited, the market-leader in open operating systems
for smartphones, today announced that the two companies are partnering
to bring consumers a powerful mobile TV experience to
Symbian smartphones.
Sling Media will deliver
aversion of its popular SlingPlayer Mobile software application,
currently available only in the U.S.and Canada, for Symbian OSin select
European and Asian countries during Q4 and will extend availability to
the U.S.shortly there after. Unlike other offerings available on the
market today,SlingPlayer Mobile delivers customers’ complete home TV
experience on mobile handsets using standard network connections,
including 3G cellular and WiFi.
The new SlingPlayer
Mobile for Symbian OS software package will enable users to transform
their supported Symbian smartphones on S60 and UIQ into personal,
on-the-go digital TVs providing anytime, anywhere access to their living
room television experience. Any program that can be watched athome will
be viewable through a Slingbox on supported Symbian smartphones using3G
or WiFi, including support for terrestrial TV, Freeview, cable,
andsatellite TV. In addition, SlingPlayer Mobile lets users control
their home personal video recorder (PVR) to watch recorded shows, pause,
and rewind live TV or even queue new recordings while away from home.
“Symbian’s
market leading position drove our decision to work with them and deliver
the Slingbox experience to a large mobile customer base,” said Blake
Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media. "People love their living
room TV programming and simply want the ability to watch it on any
device wherever they happen to be, whether at work on their PC,
around the home on their wireless laptop, or on the go via their mobile
phone. I've been using a beta version of the SlingPlayer Mobile on a
Symbian smartphone, and it's pure sweetness."
Symbian
licenses Symbian OS to the world’s leading handset manufacturers. To
date, over82 million Symbian smartphones have been sold worldwide to
over 250 major network operators. According to Gartner, Symbian
accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the
second quarter of 2006.
“Symbian works
collaboratively with its licensees and partners to foster innovation and
set trends for new smartphone features and capabilities, thereby
expanding the market for 3G-based multimedia applications,”said Jerry
Panagrossi, vice president, US operations, Symbian. “SlingPlayer Mobile
is a breakthrough in mobileTV viewing that captures the essence of the
new smartphone lifestyle, representing a new level of interaction with
the world and immediacy for information and entertainment.”
The
combined mobile TV experience is driven by Sling Media’s breakthrough
product, the Slingbox.The Slingbox redirects, or “placeshifts,” a
single live TV stream from a standard or Freeview cable connection,
cable box, satellite receiver or PVR tothe viewer’s 3G handset or PC
located anywhere in the home or anywhere in the world.
AboutSling Media
Sling Media, Inc. is a digital lifestyle products company creating
afamily of consumer electronics solutions that are a natural extension
of today’s digital way of life. The first member of the Sling Media
family is the award-winning Slingbox™, a device that allows consumers to
access their living room television experience at any time,from any
location, using a variety of different displays including laptops
and desktop PCs, PDAs and smartphones. For more information on Sling
Media or the Slingbox, visit www.slingmedia.com.
About Symbian
Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses
Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced,
data-enabled mobile phones, also known as smartphones.
Symbian licenses Symbian OS to theworld’s leading handset
manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships
with leading companies across the mobile industry. During H12006, 24
million Symbian OS phones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network
operators, bringing the total number of Symbian OS phones shipped
to 82.8 million.
Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom with offices
in the United States, Europe (England and Sweden (UIQ Technology AB)),
Israel and Asia (India, P.R. China, Korea, and Japan)