Sling Media dominates the nascent place-shifting market with the Slingbox, and rightfully so IMHO. However, they do have competition, mainly Sony’s Location Free Television and Snappy Multimedia’s Hava products. The Hava products are also now sold under the Monsoon brand. Monsoon issued a press release today announcing the availability of two Hava models – see below.

The Hava boxes differ from the Slingbox in a few key ways. They use MPEG-2 locally, and MPEG-4 for remote streaming, while the SB uses WMV9/VC-1 for all streaming. The local MPEG-2 encoding on the Hava is DVD compatible, so it is possible to record the stream and burn it to DVD. Which is another point – Hava enables recording the stream on a local receiving PC, Sling does not. Hava has also been integrated into Windows XP Media Center Edition and Windows Vista so that you can use the Hava box as a remote tuner for Windows. Hava also supports multiple simultaneous stream clients, while Slingbox is limited to one.

But Hava is limited to Windows – both Windows PCs and Windows Mobile devices. There is no support for Mac OS, Palm OS, or Symbian – and no Win2k, which SB supports. Just XP and Vista. The Hava software isn’t a polished as Sling’s offering, Sling has done a lot of work on the SlingStream format to optimize the streaming experience. And Sling supports a wider variety of set top boxes.

There are a few applications where the Hava is probably the better, or only, choice – such as as a remote tuner for a MCE PC – but a Slingbox provides a better experience for most users, which is why Sling dominates the market.

The press release:
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