Less than two weeks after our open letter to Slingbox, followed by their announcement, Slingbox for Facebook has arrived. SlingPlayer allows you to view your streamed cable box content anywhere, and that now includes a new Facebook app. You can change channels and control your DVR via a graphical remote:
The app’s page says it already has 4,000 monthly subscribers — a number that we’ll be tracking closely. The player is not much different than the browser-based version they already had. One small but significant feature is I previously had to use Safari for Slingplayer since it wasn’t compatible with Chrome. Now through Facebook I’m able to watch my Slingbox through Chrome.
With Facebook’s growing user-base of 800 million, this is definitely a major bridge between primetime linear television and the largest social network out there. The basic social feature they currently have, which lets you type and push to your wall, what you’re watching, could provide the company a major play at working with content providers in the future. It will be interesting to see if they’ll see a large enough group of people using the players on Facebook as supposed to just the web app as well.