Sling Media has officially launched its Sling.com online video portal, which we first checked out a few weeks ago while it was in beta. If you have a Slingbox, this site is all kinds of awesome, because it will allow you to watch live TV streaming from your home on any Windows PC with Firefox or Internet Explorer.

If you don't have a Slingbox, right now Sling.com is just another online video site that has an assortment of TV shows and movies from Fox, NBC, CBS, Sony, MGM, and web content providers like College Humor. Honestly, you can find most, but not all of the same content at Hulu.

Sling does plan to upgade its software so that Mac using Slingbox owners can also stream live TV. But right now anybody with a Flash enabled web browser running Windows, Mac, Linux or something else altogether can watch the web video streams from Sling Media's content partners - provided you're in the US. The content won't play outside of the region.

Online video portal Sling.com is set to open to the public on November 24th. It's currently in private beta, but we got an early peek at the service. The online video player is easy to use, and there's plenty of content from a number of major US television networks as well as ton of videos from web sites like College Humor and 60frames.

While the selection of videos is pretty extensive, that's not really what makes Sling.com special. In fact, the content library looks pretty much like what you can already find at Hulu. That makes sense, since many of the TV episodes and full length videos are coming straight from Hulu.

What makes Sling.com unlike any other online video site is the way it works with the company's Slingbox hardware. If you have a Slingbox plugged into your TV set, cable or satellite box, or TiVo, you can use Sling.com to watch live video over the web. Sling Media has offered the ability to stream video over the internet since the company's inception. But Sling.com allows you to access live, pre-recorded, and web video all in one central location.

If you have a Slingbox, there's plenty of reason to choose Sling.com over Hulu. If not, the case isn't quite as compelling at the moment. Eventually Sling Media plans to roll out social tools that let users do things like record clips of TV shows and movies using a Slingbox and share them with other users at Sling.com. But that feature isn't available yet.

You can watch Sling.com's web videos in pretty much any browser. But if you want to watch live TV, you'll need to be running Windows and using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Mac support is coming soon. I also noticed a glitch during my test that caused Firefox to crash every time I switched from watching a live program to watching web video, and then back to live video again. Hopefully that issue will be worked out by the time Sling emerges from private beta later this month.

SlingBox owners are usually pretty happy with the performance and options offered by the SlingBox. Now, at CES (where else) the makers of SlingBox are introducing a new device, called the SlingCatcher, which does basically the opposite of the SlingBox. SlingCatcher allows your PC (and more importantly its content) to interface with your TV. I am not sure I would want to see YouTube clips on a big, HDTV, since YouTube is generally not very HD-friendly, but it is darn cool anyhow. You can get the whole scoop over at GigaOM, but the prospects are enticing. The computerized living room is getting that much closer.

via GigaOM

Online games fall into all sorts of categories, and unfortunately many of them don't fall into one called "fun". That's certainly not the case with Sling, and online Flash physics-based game that is ridiculously addictive. Sling is a little dude that you control - he's basically just a head and a single hand on a stretchy arm. For such a modest little guy, he's got quite a job - nothing short of saving his world!

Sling's game play consists of grabbing Sling's head and stretching it away from whatever he's holding on to. When you let him go, he shoots in the direction he's aimed, and will grab onto anything he can during the flight. There are many different objects, obstacles and nasties that he must navigate through and past to get to his goal. You may find it's a bit too easy on the first few levels, but though easy, Sling is fun to play with just as a physics toy. But quickly the levels get more and more challenging, until you find yourself burning an hour solving a particularly difficult one.

Honestly, I don't usually let an online game suck up more than about five or ten minutes of my time. With Sling I couldn't help it; I've been playing it regularly now for days.