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.

It looks like Sling Media, makers of the Slingbox place-shifting hardware and software are finally preparing to launch Sling.com, a new online video portal first announced in January, 2007.

TechCrunch reports that Sling Media is sending out emails to some beta testers letting them know how to request an invitation to the new site, which will be launching in private beta soon.

So what exactly is Sling.com? In one sense, it will be an online video portal like Hulu or Joost, with content from partner sites including CBS and about 60 other content providers. But Sling.com will also let users with Slingbox hardware record short clips of television broadcasts and upload them to the site to share with others using a new Clip+Sling feature.

The site will also have a "preview of the web-based SlingPlayer software" which will let users watch live TV. I'm guessing this will be a limited feature. If you could actually watch unlimited live TV streams at Sling.com without buying a Slingbox, the company would be shooting itself in the foot.

Sling.com will only be available to US testers at first.