Zuneguy Bill Wittress, who works on the Zune team is a pretty big fan of place-shifting technology. He currently has a Slingbox in his home, and says he used Orb to watch shows while he was traveling through Asia.
So now he wants to know what y'all think about adding the ability to watch place-shifted shows on a Zune. He doesn't clarify whether such a function would work with Orb, Slingbox, or some other technology (perhaps a Windows Vista Media Center place-shifting program?).
It's kind of hard to tell when reading through these Zune developer blogs whether they're actually using their blogs for market research, or just trying to tease us. Last month Wittress also posed a question of what accessories people would like to see for the Zune. And while he's gotten 17 comments on his post so far, I just can't see that being enough to influence product development for a device that's meant to sell millions of copies.
That said, it's nice to know someone at Microsoft is thinking about actually making the Zune's WiFi useful by adding features like the ability to watch streaming video, whether it's from your PC or the internet.
1. Sling is in pretty tight with Microsoft (on their partners page for example, use WMV, support Windows Mobile and desktop OS prior to others). I can definitely see them teaming on a Zune solution.
Posted at 8:55AM on Oct 10th 2006 by Dave Zatz