Dogzilla said: While I'm a slingbox owner and would love to view cable on my iPhone, I'm not holding much hope out for this arriving any time before my Slingbox becomes irrelevant. Sling has a long history of showing tools and delivering them ridiculously late. As of right now, they have several products still pending release, and the fact that they have a demo means literally nothing. Given that Sling seems to go on bended knee to grovel for Big Media's approval, certainly more so that its own customer's approval, there's also the hurdle that Big Media might decide to kill/cripple the iPhone player to hurt Apple and in some way gain leverage over the iTunes store. Given their release history, one almost wonders whether Sling has hired a bunch of developers from the Duke Nukem Forever team. And if it seems I'm regretting my Slingbox purchase, it's only because I am. I was under the mistaken impression that I'd already paid for my cable content once and could use it how I wanted. Silly me. I should have taken the money and time to build my own Slingbox clone.

I couldn't agree more. Please Slingmedia, I love my Slingbox, but the developers better look at Steve Jobs : if he anncounces a new product, you can be sure that it will be for sale in no time. Nobody is waiting for rumours about vapourware for a product that is not on the market yet (the new Iphone). And I really doubt that Apple gave Slingmedia the information needed to devellop this "software" yet.

Well, I'm not sure what the situation is concerning Sling being accepted into the beta program. One thing I do know - you don't need Apple's approval to download and use the SDK, but you do need Apple's approval to deploy the applications you create onto even your own iPhone. This is because all applications have to be digitally signed by the developer, and Apple has to hand out the keys which you only receive upon acceptance into the Dev program. Otherwise, you're limited to testing your applications on a simulator that runs on your Mac.

So basically, Sling's demo means nothing, since it was developed with unsupported 3rd-party APIs. Anything developed this way could stop working after any update from Apple. When/if they are accepted into the Dev program, they may be able to reuse some of the code, but they may also find that they have to rewrite large portions of the demo app. I leave it to you to imagine how long that would take Sling.

There's two other things this whole fiasco brings up:

1) Why is Apple leaving Sling out in the cold? At this point, even small developers in other countries have been accepted. I can pretty much guarantee that Apple isn't blind to the demand of having Slingplayer on an iPhone, nor is it blind to the cool factor of having live TV running on an iPhone. It's possible Apple views Sling as a competitor in some fashion, although that seems a real stretch. It's also possible that Apple is aware that Sling has treated Mac users as second-class citizens and is returning the favor - this would fit in with Jobs' personality, although that assumes he even reviews or cares which developers get accepted, which seems unlikely. So, not sure what the deal is with Sling and the iPhone SDK.

2) Given that Sling is willing to develop and demo an app they created with the 3rd-party APIs, why don't they just take the next step and release that? Sure, it requires a jailbroken iPhone/iTouch, but so what? Just release it with no support - those of us with jailbroken iPhones don't really expect support anyway. This might put a little pressure on Apple and would also provide some feedback. Other developers have released apps for jailbroken iPhones/iPods - what's holding Sling back?