I phoned SlingMedia from the surgery where I work this afternoon and was told that I had to be in front of my machine and to call back later.

I left work early to be able to do that before they closed at eight o'clock.

I called when I got home at 19:27.

I am still waiting and it is now 20:16.

"A SlingMedia representative will be with you shortly. Please note that your call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes. Thank you for your patience."

Well I've been waiting for 52 minutes and 7 seconds now. What's going on? Have they closed? Could I be listening to this recording until they open in the morning?

That's a new definition of the word "quality" of which I was not previously aware.

I know that this forum has nothing to do with SlingMedia and has been set up to help people but I can't resist telling anyone who has any ideas about buying one of these little boxes that the service and technology from SlingMedia is absolutely terrible.

I run three servers with SBS Business Server for a living. I'm not technologically impaired. I have server 2008 on my laptop for God's sake (not the machine I use for SlingPlayer). The SlingBox may work "out of the box" for some but it has not worked for me. The set-up app crashed. There is no real remote control for it that lets me use my cable services and to top it off, I've just wasted 1 hour 8 minutes and 6 seconds of my life listening to some silly woman talking about "quality".

Will you be buying the SlingPlayer? My advice - sling that idea.