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You [Sling Media] have been doing such a fantastic job of supporting your customers. Do you think you can keep this up going forward? What kinds of things are you doing differently besides Jeremy [Toeman, VP Market Development] going out and communicating with customers?

We made a conscious decision in the beginning to provide exceptional support. If anything, we wanted to err on the side of oversupporting, picking up on and making an investment in our early customers who are incredibly valuable to us. We're a small company, and don't have a lot of money to spend on marketing, so to the extent we can have our customers spread the word and be our ambassadors is very valuable. I think the challenge over time is that you can't continue to grow linearly with your customers because of support costs, so the idea is to have some economies there. Some of it will naturally take care of itself because we have a better record of issues that people face with the product and how to solve them. We have better documentation and things like that, and then there is the power of forums like SlingCommunity where you have customers helping other customers.


Let's switch gears, and talk about some features and new things that are coming out. The PAL Slingbox is in beta testing now. How's that going, and can we be expecting that soon?

It's somewhat of a limited beta, and we're rolling it out in stages... Sometimes when you do a mass beta, it's hard to listen to the feedback you're getting because you're so busy trying to take care of everyone. If you do it in stages you can actually listen to what they're saying. Those early beta users, if you pick them right, can be very valuable, and we've had great beta testers all the way through. We haven't announced exactly how we're coming to market, but you can expect it in the first half of this year. We're not yet saying which regions, but Europe in general.


Do you think [the Slingbox] is going to be as popular, or even more popular, there than it is in the US?

The one thing that can be said about Europe is that it's not any one thing... it's very fragmented. For people that use our product, there's a lot of different things that impact the success in the market, whether it's broadband connectivity, like the speeds, or the culture for watching TV, like if they use DVRs or not... there are many subtleties. Americans happen to be very passionate about television; it's a very important pastime. So I think there's a mix, but based on some of the events we did early on before the US launch, we're getting some great response. So, I'm optimistic, definitely.


What about the client side. You've got Windows Mobile that just kicked off, which is due out the first half of the year...

First quarter, yeah.


First quarter... even sooner. Excellent. You must be very excited about that.

Yeah, I think it really is our first true mobile client, and we do have many people that are using their SlingPlayer with their PCs with an EVDO card over a [cellular] network, and are really, really happy with that. But, this is our first foray into the true mobile environment, where now not only from your hotel room, workplace, or hotspot, but pretty much anywhere you can access your TV. That includes a pretty broad [area] of the US now, I mean both Sprint and Verizon have been pretty aggressive in rolling out these services. For someone to be able to actually be able to see their TiVo menu, and navigate through it on their mobile is totally different from the television services that are being rolled out, and it doesn't cost ten dollars a month. So, it's just an extension of what people have. We're thrilled.


Just to follow up on that, too, I'll ask you directly. To get the Windows Mobile Client, is it a free upgrade to my existing service?

We haven't decided what our pricing strategy is. It won't be a service though, I can tell you that.


Well right now you can download the SlingPlayer software for free off the web.

Yes, the PC client. So there's just, in general, the question of what our pricing strategy is as we develop more and more clients. At some point, it takes money and resources to create [these other clients], and there are a lot of people asking for a lot of different things.

Interview continued on page 3

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