Amazon Finally Tries Out the ‘Netflix for Books’ Craze

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Amazon is already a go-to place for people who love to binge on shopping, TV shows, and music, thanks to its all-you-can-consume Amazon Prime service. And now, it seems, the company wants to lure binge readers too.

According to Gigaom, the e-commerce giant is working on a subscription ebook service called Kindle Unlimited, which would offer unlimited ebook rentals for $9.99 a month. It’s a move that’s very much aligned with where both the tech and the publishing industry are headed.

While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap.

We tech-savvy consumers have grown accustomed to the unlimited buffet. Pay Netflix or Hulu a flat fee, and we can binge on all the movies and TV shows we could ever want to watch. For music lovers, there’s Spotify. And yet, among the tech giants, Amazon’s Kindle book store, is one of the last a la carte menus left. Users either buy a book at a time or, at best, rent a book a month for free through the company’s Amazon Prime service. As the Netflix model has grown, it’s become increasingly obvious that there should be a “Netflix for books” too.

While Amazon has been slow to build it, enterprising startups have been more than happy to fill that gap. The New York City startup, Oyster, for one, has raised $17 million for its all-you-can-read app. Scribd, which started as a publishing platform for long Web documents, launched a similar service last year. Even some publishers have tried it.

Clearly, Amazon has been listening. Not only is this activity in the startup community proof that the model is becoming popular with readers, but Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos likely sees Kindle Unlimited as a lucrative revenue stream for Amazon. Right now, the company’s big moneymaker is Amazon Prime, which provides unlimited digital music, TV shows, and movies as well as unlimited shipping for physical goods—all at a cost of $99. Kindle Unlimited, by contrast, would cost users $120 a year, if the leaked price is right. Plus, it could also drive the sales of Kindle devices.

That said, Amazon may have to overcome one obstacle it’s not quite used to, and that is, competing with tiny startups. If Kindle Unlimited had launched last year, Oyster and Scribd might never had a chance of survival, as both companies were still building their libraries and striking deals with publishers. One year later, though, Oyster has partnerships with big names like Simon & Schuster, and more than 500,000 titles in its library. Screenshots of Kindle Unlimited’s test pages say the service offers 638,416 titles, not much more than Oyster. Plus, users don’t have to buy another device to get their books from Oyster. They can read them right from their phones.

No matter who wins the space, one thing is for sure: the publishing industry, already changed by the e-reader, is about to undergo another radical transformation.

An Actually Useful Version of Yo Is Warning Israelis of Rocket Strikes

The Red Alert app (left) and the original Yo! app. Red Alert/Yo

Ridiculed for being gimmicky and useless, the app that was released on April Fool’s Day is now being used to save lives in one of the planet’s most complex conflict zones. Israeli citizens have begun relying on Yo for warnings of impending rocket strikes by Palestinian militants.

The messaging app has partnered with Red Alert, a real-time missile notification service and self-described “propaganda tool” used in Israel. Following the implementation of the Red Color emergency siren system in 2012, there were concerns that people might not hear—or even sleep through—the sirens. Red Alert acts as a complement to the sirens. Yo users can now follow “RedAlertIsrael” to get a “Yo” at the same time that the sirens go off. The user typically receives a warning via smartphone 15 to 90 seconds before a rocket hits.

Without Yo, the Red Alert app simply sends an alert (audio optional) with a potential city-wide location, like Jerusalem or Ashkelon. Working in conjunction with Yo’s push notification service, Red Alert is able to reach a larger pool of citizens who might be vulnerable to rocket fire near Gaza. It’s quickly becoming one of the most popular apps in Israel.

Created in just eight hours by an Israeli-born San Francisco resident, the standalone Yo app sends you push notifications from your friends saying “Yo.” That’s it. Oddly enough, this “one-bit communication” platform took the tech community by storm this Spring, attracting $1.5 million from early investors. Since its debut, it has been downloaded almost 2 million times. The silly app takes on importance when that “Yo” message means a rocket is coming your way.

Ideally, the Red Alerts should pinpoint the location of a potential attack, but early reports suggest the service has been buggy, or doesn’t provide Yo users with a location at all. Red Alert gets its classified data from the Israeli Defense Force and Homefront Command, co-founder Ari Sprung tells The Times of Israel , then breaks down the potential threats.

More than a week into the current hostilities, Israel suffered its first fatality. Approximately 185 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 1,200 have been injured.

Amidst the chaos, it’s hard to determine if the app has saved lives in the region, or if it’s functioning more as an Israeli public relations tool to reveal the violence in the region to the outside world. Anand Varghese, a program officer with the U.S. Institute of Peace’s PeaceTech Initiative, says it’s probably a little bit of both.

“The fact that Israel’s Ambassador to the U.S. encouraged developers to create an English-language version of the app certainly tells me that he sees it as a way to reach people outside the country. As with every technology-based early warning we see in the field, the need to establish mechanisms for early response is the real key. In the larger scheme of their extensive military capabilities, I doubt that Israel is hinging its citizens’ lives on an app that provides 15 seconds of response time before a rocket hits.”

The Red Alert/Yo service is not available for Palestinians concerned about Israeli air strikes. Networks in the Occupied Territories can only provide 2G connectivity as Israel restricts bandwidth. Twitter hashtags remain a popular way for Palestinians to receive alerts and avoid danger.

This Friendly Robot Could One Day Be Your Family’s Personal Assistant

Jibo

For many families, the tablet has become the central, shared computing device in the home. It’s a hub for learning, for entertainment, and for staying connected. But what if your tablet was even more interactive? What if it woke up when you can home, recognized your face, and suggested a couple of things you might want for dinner? What if, when asked a spoken question, it could tailor its answer directly to you, instead of just offering a blanket response?

A new device called Jibo can do these things, and it could mark the next step in group computer interaction in the home. But Jibo isn’t a tablet at all: It’s a robot.

Specifically, Jibo is a social robot. You talk to it, ask it questions, make requests. It talks back, provides answers, and takes care of grunt work like setting reminders or scouring the web. It’s meant to act as a helper and a partner in a variety of household experiences, much like a physical embodiment of Siri, Google Now, or any of the voice-activated concierge services available on our smartphones or tablets.

But unlike those handheld touchscreen devices, Jibo tries to act like more of a participant than a tool, as if it’s a part of the family. It has a big round head, and a face that “looks” around the room. The foot-tall, bulbous body can rotate to address the person speaking. It even leans a bit when it turns to face you, as though it’s listening more intently.

Jibo is only a prototype right now. The team behind it, headed by founder Cynthia Breazeal, who is also director of MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots Group, hopes to bring it to market in time for the 2015 holiday season. Curious early adopters can join the crowdfunding campaign that begins today. The pre-sale price tag is $500 for early backers, and $600 for a developer kit. That’s a little more than the cost of a good tablet. And Brezeal is clear about how Jibo is designed to perform the same types of interactions families currently use tablets for, but to do so with a physical presence that fits into human lives in a more natural way than just another touchscreen.

Like a tablet, Jibo can take photos and videos. It can pull up information from the web or an app, it can act as a teleconferencing device, and it can be used to queue up books or videos. Using a mixture of facial and voice recognition (as well as an iOS and Android app), it personalizes these experiences for you. You can ask Jibo to order your favorite take-out Chinese meal after arriving home from a late night at work. Or tell it to display an e-book on its face-screen, turning a storybook into an interactive, theatrical experience for you and your child. It can recognize and greet you when you get home, or remind you to make an important phone call in between the day’s errands.

“We need technology to transcend the world of information into a more humanized realm,” Breazeal told WIRED. The connected home of the future shouldn’t feel cold and computerized, operated with Star Trek-like voice commands, she says. It should be warm and personal, interacting with us on an emotional level in addition to being able to perform useful tasks.

And thanks to the mobile computing revolution, for the first time, sensors and processors are small, efficient, and cheap enough for something like this to take the form of a robot that’s both priced and sized reasonably enough for consumers.

“Something like this is a nice bridge between devices and tablets and robots that we imagine in science fiction,” Breazeal says.

How It Works

One of Jibo’s key features is human and facial recognition. Using a stereo camera system, it can distinguish people from their background surroundings so it knows when there’s a person in the room. In particular, it can recognize faces, so it knows which human it’s talking to. When development is complete, Jibo will also be able to recognize facial expressions so it can guess your mood and cater its interactions to your current state of mind.

On-board hardware includes a 360 degree mic array so the robot can perform sound isolation, identifying when it’s being spoken to even if the person talking is not right next to it. Dual speakers supply its voice and other audio. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios keep it connected. A quad-core ARM processor act as the brains. On its face is a circular LCD touchscreen, and its plastic “skin” is also touch-responsive. A 3-axis motor system allows the top section to spin all the way around on the base. While it’s meant to stay plugged in the majority of the time, it does include a battery so you can move it around the house for short periods.

Interface and Design

Though Jibo is still a prototype, Breazeal’s team developed a demo to show what the robot will eventually be fully capable of in terms of looks and behavior. The appearance is close to final. Jibo actually looks a lot like Eve from the movie Wall-E, at least in the prototype I saw. The body is shiny, circular and white. The head is spherical, though a chunk is cleanly sliced out of it so a flat LCD display can act as its face. “For a while, we were excited about curved displays, but we realized that the technology wouldn’t be ready and robust enough,” Breazeal says.

Jibo turns to look at you when you talk to it.

The head and body can both rotate 360 degrees, so the robot can rotate to look at whoever is speaking to it, or just swivel and twist animatedly as it responds and interacts with you (kind of reminiscent of the Keepon robot).

As for the onscreen user interface, Breazeal added a character animator to the team to handle that task. Instead of some sort of app or list menu as an interface, or a human-like face, Jibo’s screen displays a simple, white sphere. This ball can morph into other graphical elements: a clock, an illustration of the weather, a heart, a smile. It’s designed to be dynamic and easy to read from across the room. It comes across as friendly, familiar, and expressive, all without being too cute, or verging anywhere near the uncanny valley. It’s technology humanized, but not necessarily in humanoid form.

While the prototype is expectedly rough around the edges—the LCD is low-res, and the robot’s movements are sometimes too abrupt and swift to seem natural—the potential is clear.

Jibo takes what we’ve learned from smartphone and tablet experiences, specifically from voice interactions in systems like Google Now, and builds on it. It does much of what the software on your devices can already do—learn your preferences, predict your needs—but it does everything with more personality. And whether Jibo succeeds or fails depends a lot on how that personality jibes with the humans who have to live with it.

6 Design Concepts From IDEO That Rethink Aging

Owl IDEO Palo Alto designed a kit that helps you capture thoughts and bits of wisdom throughout the years. The Owl comes with 80 glass tubes, each representing a year of your life. Photo: IDEO

Owl IDEO Palo Alto designed a kit that helps you capture thoughts and bits of wisdom throughout the years. The Owl comes with 80 glass tubes, each representing a year of your life.

Photo: IDEO

You scribble a thought or memory down on paper, roll it up and stick it in a tube. Think of it as a high-design time capsule. In a time where most of our memories are digital, the goal of the Owl is to slow down time, to tangibly represent the aging process. Photo: IDEO

You scribble a thought or memory down on paper, roll it up and stick it in a tube. Think of it as a high-design time capsule. In a time where most of our memories are digital, the goal of the Owl is to slow down time, to tangibly represent the aging process.

Photo: IDEO

Pill Necklace This necklace, designed by IDEO London, is meant to spur conversation about meds. The jewelry, which resembles a candy necklace, is meant to remind the wearer's loved ones how often they’ve taken their pills. Dividers split the pills into day parts. Usability-wise, this necklace would be way too fiddly, but it's really meant to spur discussion around the issue. “It’s a bit of a provocation,” says Addi. Image: IDEO

Pill Necklace This necklace, designed by IDEO London, is meant to spur conversation about meds. The jewelry, which resembles a candy necklace, is meant to remind the wearer's loved ones how often they’ve taken their pills. Dividers split the pills into day parts. Usability-wise, this necklace would be way too fiddly, but it's really meant to spur discussion around the issue. “It’s a bit of a provocation,” says Addi.

Image: IDEO

Goofy Foot Walker A walker makes people feel old. “No one wants to be seen with one,” says Addi. But being able to modify your stuff—even a walker—brings a bit of humor into what could otherwise be a humorless situation. As Addi sees it, “At this stage in your life you can either be in denial, or you can be self deprecating.” Image: IDEO

Goofy Foot Walker A walker makes people feel old. “No one wants to be seen with one,” says Addi. But being able to modify your stuff—even a walker—brings a bit of humor into what could otherwise be a humorless situation. As Addi sees it, “At this stage in your life you can either be in denial, or you can be self deprecating.”

Image: IDEO

Grey Mirror The Grey Mirror, designed by IDEO Boston, is a reminder that the choices we make now actually do impact on our future lives. The mirror shows you how you’ll look in a few decades via artificially aged photographs. IDEO hopes will spur better choices in the present, but not surprisingly, beauty companies have been very interested in the idea. “They’ve been asking, how conceptual is this?” says Addi. Image: IDEO

Grey Mirror The Grey Mirror, designed by IDEO Boston, is a reminder that the choices we make now actually do impact on our future lives. The mirror shows you how you’ll look in a few decades via artificially aged photographs. IDEO hopes will spur better choices in the present, but not surprisingly, beauty companies have been very interested in the idea. “They’ve been asking, how conceptual is this?” says Addi.

Image: IDEO

Overdelivery Not every concept is an object. Overdelivery is a service that add a little extra care to the delivery of stuff. Background-checked workers will help the elderly with simple tasks like moving heavy boxes or setting up appliances. Over time, they can keep an eye on the recipient's health—like a grandchild in a UPS uniform. Photo: IDEO

Overdelivery Not every concept is an object. Overdelivery is a service that add a little extra care to the delivery of stuff. Background-checked workers will help the elderly with simple tasks like moving heavy boxes or setting up appliances. Over time, they can keep an eye on the recipient's health—like a grandchild in a UPS uniform.

Photo: IDEO

Up In YearsA campaign designed by IDEO Boston brings awareness to a hidden truth: Your grandma still likes to do it. STDs are a serious problem among the elderly, a fact that IDEO calls out in a blunt, if a little uncomfortable, way. “We’re acknowledging that these things do exist, and looking for solutions,” says Addi. IDEO

Up In YearsA campaign designed by IDEO Boston brings awareness to a hidden truth: Your grandma still likes to do it. STDs are a serious problem among the elderly, a fact that IDEO calls out in a blunt, if a little uncomfortable, way. “We’re acknowledging that these things do exist, and looking for solutions,” says Addi.

IDEO

Our world is aging rapidly, but we’re also aging for longer. Globally, the average life expectancy has increased by six years since 1990, which is more significant than it might sound. As life expectancy changes, the way we think about getting older is changing, too. Problem is, there’s very little attention being paid to that fact in the design world.

For its most recent of DesignsOn, IDEO asked its offices to come up with a series of designs that addresses that problem. DesignsOn started in 2008 as an internal challenge for IDEO designers to address tricky issues like global warming, food, birth and now aging. It’s an exercise in thinking blue sky and conceptually about a problem, a chance to answer hard questions without the constraints of a client. Like, for instance: How can you improve the aging process through good design?

The 19 resulting concepts are a varied collection of answers from designers around the world. “We originally did this because we felt like for all the talk and statistics and buzz, things weren’t really getting designed,” says Gretchen Addi, a partner at IDEO who headed up DesignsOn Aging.

The way we experience our age is different now than a couple decades ago. Today, people are less concerned with a number than life stage. “In my parents’ generation, the expected lifespan was 75 years old, max probably,” says Addi. “When they reached 50 or 55 they were thinking differently than someone today who thinks about their life at 50 or 55.”

IDEO’s designs look at the issue through the lens of: How can we make it easier, more fun and, most importantly, more relevant to get older? Check out the slideshow for some of their ideas.

New Game Disney Tsum Tsum Is the Cutest Little Money-Devourer

Disney Interactive

Disney doesn’t want you to play its new iOS game Disney Tsum Tsum; not exactly. What it wants is for you to have played it.

Why? Because it’s a free-to-play game of the sort that will not generate any money as long as you’re actually engaged in the act of playing it. It’s a lightning-fast puzzle game that demands far too much of your attention to hit you up for purchases mid-game. So the design of Tsum Tsum is carefully engineered to get you out of the core game as fast as possible and back into the menu screens, where it has multiple opportunities to remind you of how badly you just did, and how many different ways you might be able to spend some money to improve on that.

Tsum Tsum is a matching game, so it’s sort of like Bejeweled except instead of every matchable niblet being lined up in neat 90-degree grids, they’re a bunch of oblong, stylized Disney character heads resting in an unstable manner in a wide bowl. So you can match things up just as long as they’re sitting relatively close to each other, and if you want to put some English on it you can tilt your phone to roll them around a little.

You might think that with this much fudge factor in the design, it might be very easy to link up huge chains of matching Eeyores, and you’d be right but for the game’s stringent timer. Each game lasts exactly 60 seconds, which doesn’t give you much time to sit back and plan out chains of combos. You can extend your time, but only by a few seconds and only if you create a seriously massive chain.

Happy with your final score? You won’t be, not once you see what your friends scored. Tsum Tsum is very much a social game, except instead of being connected to your Facebook it’s connected to Line, the Japanese chat application that’s all the rage in many Asian markets these days. (My wife’s whole extended family is on it, to give you an idea.) So you can see your Line friends that are playing, and note that their scores are higher than yours.

How to increase it? You could practice, but that’s only going to take you so far. Plus, you can only play if you have Hearts, and those regenerate at the sluggish pace of one every 15 minutes. So you could not go on a Tsum Tsum bender even if you wanted to.

Fortunately, Tsum Tsum, having created a new problem in your life, now gives you the tools to solve it. You can spend as much money as you like on temporary bonus items that give you a boost during a single game, such as spending coins for the opportunity to get more experience, points, or (yes) coins from your next game. You can’t buy coins with dollars, but you can buy rubies with dollars, and buy coins with rubies, and by that point you’re hopefully not thinking about how many dollars a coin represents. (You can earn coins and rubies through normal gameplay, but it is agonizingly slow.)

But the primary money pit is in the acquisition of more Tsum characters. You can set a character to be your MyTsum, and each of these carries with them a special power into battle. You begin with Mickey Mouse, of course. Mickey Mouse sucks. His power is to eliminate a small handful of characters from the middle of the board, which gives you few points and doesn’t necessarily make the situation any more advantageous.

Disney Interactive

But if you buy different characters, perhaps their powers will help you do better! But of course one does not simply buy more characters. In the grand gacha tradition, you have to spend days’ worth of coins to buy a blind box that contains a random character. The truly great characters are locked away in the Premium Boxes, which cost 30,000 coins (about $6, I think; who can truly know?).

In my experience, the best 10,000 coins I ever gambled was on a regular box to get Dale the chipmunk. He and Chip are the best characters we’ve found so far: They turn an entire line of characters into chipmunks, all of which can be matched up whether they are Chip or Dale. So with some good luck and strategy, but mostly luck, you can drop the chipmunk bomb at the opportune time to put together an insane combo.

Once you’ve achieved a relatively high score, Tsum Tsum attempts to open up your wallet one last time. This is the most devious of all: At the end of a round, if your current score is close to your high score, it asks you if you wouldn’t like to spend 5 rubies (50 cents or thereabouts) to give yourself just a few more precious seconds of time.

The devious part is that it isn’t even done tallying your score yet, and odds are that once the end-of-round bonus points are added in, you may have actually already beaten your high score! And adding a few more seconds, which is only enough to make another couple of matches, likely won’t bump your score up by that much.

I have a confession to make. I did it anyway. Not with real money but with a significant of the tiny stash of free rubies I’d acquired. I actually had a colossal match lined up on the board when I ran out of time, and… well, I knew I was pretty close to rocketing past my wife’s high score. And her sister’s. And everybody’s. So I fell for it. (It was “research” for an “article,” I told myself.) It totally worked, and I boosted my score by at least 20 percent.

But they wipe the scores away every week, so now I’m on the bottom of the leaderboards again.

Disney Tsum Tsum is a fun game in small doses. The touch controls work well, the music is pleasant and it’s just fun to shoot down a whole pile of Piglets when they fall perfectly into place. And to be honest, the gameplay is probably too shallow to hold up as anything more extensive than a 60-second frantic burst of quick strategy. So if you need a timewaster, this could be it.

And if you find yourself too addicted, just take heart: It’s an online application that you’re logging into, so whenever Disney decides to shut it down, it’ll just disappear forever, with no evidence it ever existed.

Mind-Bending GIFs Push the Limits of the Format

Micaël Reynaud

Micaël Reynaud has been making a name for himself lately by playing with the technical limitations of the GIF, creating looped studies of perspective and motion that are unlike anything you’ve likely seen before.

“Sometimes I try to experiment with a technical things; morphing, time lapse, stop motion, zoom, slit cam, a lot of things,” the French graphic artist says about his technique. “This is… what I like about the genre of the loop—whether it’s GIF or not, I don’t care—with loops there is not only one way to go.”

Reynaud uses various DSLR and point-and-shoot cameras to make the GIFs and he’ll often modify them to create new effects. Reappropriating traditional video approaches is also one of his tricks. The GIF at the top of the page, for example, uses a slit-scan camera to mimic a common technique that makes the background shift dramatically in relation to the apparently stationary subject in the foreground.

Software is critical to the process too. Different programs, including common platforms like Adobe Photo Suite, offer their own advantages and disadvantages for applying morph effects, fades, layering sequences, or compression for a nice color gradient. The GIF format has its constraints, so it often takes a lot of time and patience to create a sequence that looks good and forms a believable loop.

“When you make just a one-second or two-second motion, you must focus on going more into details, and that can take a long time if you want to make it perfect. It’s not always perfect when I do it, but I do my best,” Reynaud says.

Micaël Reynaud

Reynaud says an idea for a loop can come from a particular photographic approach he wants to try, or from simply sitting with a camera and observing parts of his environment. Whether it’s the patient posturing of a pigeon or the psychedelically staggered time lapse of a pizza baking in the oven, he is constantly looking for new ways to exploit the medium. Cat GIFs are good for a couple laughs, but Reynaud’s work reaches father and offers a unique perspective on the world around us.

“I’m a freelance graphic designer, but the more time goes on, I’m a bit older, and I want to work for myself in an artistic way. So I come back to my first loves: photography, drawing, and additionally experimenting with machines,” he says.

Overall, Reynaud says he approaches photography and loops with a sort of hacker mentality, treating them like a problem that needs solving. He tries things out and explores various conceptual and technical avenues as new ideas occur. Instead of striving for a particular style, he’s likes to constantly experiment.

“If I find something interesting, I want to explore the thing. I don’t want to repeat the past, but discover new things. The process is a more artistic one…I want to surprise myself,” he says.

Micaël Reynaud

New Slingbox Makes Streaming Cable TV to Your Gadgets Easier Than Ever

The new $150 Slingbox M1 is the cheapest Sling-branded way to stream from your home TV to a laptop or mobile device. Sling Media

After the Supreme Court ruling against Aereo, many people wondered what it would mean for the future of streaming services and devices that didn’t have the full blessing of the major networks. Indeed, an emboldened Fox is already making legal moves to ban the Dish Network’s Hopper DVRs due to their integrated “Sling” functionality, which lets users stream live programs to other devices.

None of this seems to be deterring EchoStar, the sister company of Dish and the owner of Sling Media, though. Today, the company announced a new entry-level Slingbox as well as a rebranded version of the higher-end Slingbox 500. The former, the Slingbox M1, doesn’t offer a huge jump in terms of functionality over the Slingbox 350 it replaces—bad for potential upgraders, but good for those who feared Aereo’s defeat would have an immediate chilling effect. The M1 will be the cheapest Sling-branded way to stream from your home TV to a laptop or mobile device.

The main thing it adds to the 350’s feature set is Wi-Fi connectivity. You had to connect the 350 to your router via an Ethernet cable, but now you just connect the box to your home Wi-Fi network during setup. What’s still missing is an HDMI-in option from your cable box to the Slingbox. The signal feeding into the Slingbox M1 is done via an included component-video cable.

Aesthetically, there are some minor changes, too. The Slingbox M1 is a low-key, VHS-tape-sized black box, and lacks the textured finish and space-Toblerone stylings of previous Slingbox hardware.

You can change channels while you’re watching the feed away from home, and the approach to doing so is pretty antiquated. There’s an IR emitter built into the M1, as well as an included emitter cable that gives you more flexibility when you’re positioning it. When you change the channel via the Slingbox app, you’re literally changing the channel at home. Literally meaning literally.

Because the feed is streaming from your home, you have access to your local news, sports, and other broadcasts when you’re thousands of miles away. There’s no geoblocking involved. You can also extend the feed from your cable box to other sets in your home (or your other homes) via a Slingbox app for Roku, Apple TV, and other set-top boxes.

Streaming from the Slingbox to the browser-based desktop or laptop browser is free, as is streaming to the desktop app for Mac OS and Windows. However, streaming to a mobile device will cost you, and you can’t use the browser in that scenario. The iOS and Android versions of the SlingPlayer app are $15 apiece, and buying one of those apps is required to make the Roku and Apple TV features work. The set-top boxes use your phone, which must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network, as a receiver.

The Slingbox M1 costs $150 and will be available starting July 20. But unless you plan on watching everything on a laptop or desktop, tack on that extra $15 for the mobile app.

The other “new” device is the $300 SlingTV, which is the same hardware as the Slingbox 500 running new firmware. The new platform is HTML 5 based, with its own app ecosystem, custom pop-up displays, and sports tickers that can run on top of live programming. All those new features are also available as a firmware update for the Slingbox 500. The rebranded box and firmware update are both due at the end of August.