Other platforms aside, SlingPlayer for Facebook seems to work well. I was able to connect to my Slingbox SOLO without any problems. Unfortunately my Slingbox PRO-HD recently died (won’t boot, power LED just flashes) and I haven’t replaced it yet, so I can’t test HD streaming. Note that these are the only two models that will work with this new player, just as with recent releases for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, etc. So if you have a Slingbox Classic, AV, TUNER, or PRO – sorry, you’re out of luck. The SOLO and PRO-HD are the only two models that stream in H.264, and that’s what the recent players are using due to platform requirements. Flash natively supports H.264, but not WMV, which is what the older Slingboxes used. Same for mobile devices – pretty much every mobile device has hardware H.264 decoding, but few support WMV.

It should also work with the handful of SlingLoaded devices out there, like the Dish Network ViP 922 and EchoStar HDS-600RS, and the Dish Network Sling Adapter.

In addition to releasing SlingPlayer for Facebook, they’ve also added Chrome to the supported browsers on watch.slingbox.com. This one is an extension for Chrome, not a Flash-based player. Officially, watch.slingbox.com works with the PRO-HD, SOLO, and PRO. It may work with the Classic, TUNER, and AV, but Sling recommends using the old desktop clients with those.

Here’s Sling Media’s Vicky Shum demonstrating SlingPlayer for Facebook:

Now, for the geeks, I poked into the markup, and this is the URL that will load the bare Flash SlingPlayer: http://download.slingmedia.com/player/embedded/v14/austinapp.swf I’d love to hear reports from people trying it on different platforms – game consoles, portable devices, etc. Leave a comment.

I wonder if I could even embed the player right here? Let’s find out!

EDIT: Well, the answer is yes. But the embed code included some kind of token so everyone who used it was accessing my Slingbox. Unfortunately, looking at the markup on Facebook, the login form is external to the Flash player so it looks like you can’t login or logout within the player. I’d thought it was just because I’d logged in on Facebook and it cookie’d me, but I guess not. So I’m just going to pull that out of the post.

Speaking of the product, this is a SlingPlayer implemented as a Facebook App and it takes advantage of that by integrating social features. You can comment on the video you’re watching and post those comments to your Wall. Note, this is not Clip+Sling Part Deux, you can’t actually post video to your Wall. Though Vicky does say “In future releases we’ll be adding more social and sharing features” during the video. Maybe they will find a way to share video clips, but since Clip+Sling seemingly died mainly due to rights issues I’m not holding my breath.

Back when Clip+Sling was in development they did develop several ways for SlingPlayer to tell what the content was by analyzing the stream. Of course it would be trivial to do on a SlingLoaded device as it knows what the content is already. Perhaps they could resurrect that tech and use it to identify the content, and then link to existing, legitimate copies online – network websites, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, etc. That could make business sense too – use referral links to services and Sling could take a cut of the action.

It looks like Vicky was using Safari on a Mac for the demo. The existing web-based SlingPlayer only supports Safari and Firefox on Mac and IE and Firefox on Windows, and requires a proprietary plug-in. This new player, like the iOS, Android, and Windows Phone mobile clients, only works with the Slingbox SOLO and PRO-HD, as they’re the only models to encode to H.264. That’s encouraging, as H.264 support is common and Facebook is already full of such video. So I’m thinking this is a lighter weight app, perhaps Flash, and it will have broader browser support – like Chrome. That alone would be a major advancement. If so I hope they update the standalone web-based player as well – they can keep the old plug-in version around for those who need compatibility with older model Slingboxes.

If you search on ‘SlingPlayer’ on Facebook right now you’ll get a link to SlingPlayer for Facebook on apps.facebook.com, but the page errors when I try to go there. I suspect access is locked down to only beta testers and that’s what happens if your account is not authorized to access it. But it is something to keep an eye on.

While it is nice to see this is in the works, I really hope they get some of their other SlingPlayer products out first. They showed off SlingPlayer for Google TV back in January at CES, and it entered beta in June, yet we still haven’t seen it. They have SlingPlayer for Android phones and tablets already. The version shown at CES was a Flash-based web page, maybe the delay is because they decided to do it as an app for Google TV 2.0. That might be for the best since Adobe just decided to drop the Flash plugin for TV devices – like Google TV. Either way, let’s have it already!

And then in June they showed off a similar SlingPlayer for Boxee. But that hasn’t released yet either. I think it is really cool that they’re doing these SlingPlayer clients – as I’ve said before, I argued for this approach instead of doing the SlingCatcher when I worked there. But it is just a tease if they don’t release. I’d hope they do other versions as well – Roku, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Blu-ray Java, etc. Get SlingPlayer on as many devices as you can and it’ll create demand for the Slingboxes, which is where they make their money.

So bring out SlingPlayer for Facebook – but let’s get those two versions first, we’ve been waiting. Please!

Dave Zatz of Zatz Not Funny pulled the video from Facebook and posted it to YouTube. Sling Media has posted an official version to YouTube: