In a presentation explaining his bold vision for the company, DISH’s CEO Charlie Ergen detailed plans to provide seamless mobile access to subscription TV content (based around DISH’s Sling and Hopper technology), and a plan to offer fixed wireless broadband to the estimated 40 million households that lack access to high bandwidth fiber or cable networks. Crucially, the latter would be accomplished using a combination of Clearwire’s 2.5GHz spectrum as well as satellite broadband.

That’s the theory, but in practice commentators have questioned whether the leverage inherent in DISH’s bid – for what is a considerably larger company – will constrain the ability of a merged Sprint/DISH to invest in the Sprint network and implement these plans. Further, many expect that Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, will outbid Ergen – despite his protestations to the contrary.  Ergen’s vision for DISH’s future is bold and exciting, but the question ultimately is whether Sprint is crucial to achieving it, and whether it can even work without Clearwire.

Sprint not a requirement for mobile delivery

With respect to the delivery of seamless mobile video, DISH already has most of the necessary technology available. After all, you can already use Sling on your mobile device today. The only real constraint is that the cost of wireless capacity makes it prohibitively expensive to watch mobile video on a metered 4G data plan. If DISH does indeed acquire Sprint, then it could potentially exempt Sling content from any data caps implemented for Sprint subscribers, thereby making seamless usage more feasible (and an attractive marketing point for potential new subscribers).

Nonetheless, there is nothing unique about Sprint’s network that makes it a necessary component to that strategy: DISH could just as easily shop its AWS-4 spectrum to T-Mobile for instance, which could  deliver a similar offering.

Wireless broadband crucial for success

Unlike DISH’s mobile video plans, which are responding to potential longer-term shifts in video consumption, DISH’s ambitions to deliver fixed broadband to the home appear to be far more critical to the near-term competitive position of its satellite TV business. Importantly, the entire plan appears to be predicated on the use of Clearwire’s spectrum for a national deployment. In particular, DISH is at a substantial disadvantage compared to cable and telco TV solutions, which offer integrated broadband and video-on-demand capabilities.

DISH has been attempting to acquire around 40MHz of spectrum from Clearwire since last summer, and it is hard to see where else it could hope to dig up that much spectrum for a fixed wireless broadband network, at a reasonable price – unless DISH uses its own AWS-4 spectrum. However doing so would limit Ergen’s leverage to strike a deal with a wireless operator. Alternatively, DISH could attempt to repurpose LightSquared’s spectrum, but that would be fraught with difficulties.

The greater flexibility DISH has in realizing its mobile video plans vs its fixed broadband ones suggests it may be far more important for it to acquire some of Clearwire’s spectrum than to buy all of Sprint right now. After all, if Deutsche Telekom is willing to strike a deal with DISH after completing its merger with MetroPCS, then Ergen could deploy the 2.5GHz Clearwire spectrum on T-Mobile’s network.

So the question is, might SoftBank agree to sell part of Clearwire’s spectrum to DISH, in exchange for DISH agreeing to withdraw its bid for Sprint? That would certainly be logical, but with two billionaires’ egos at stake, it’s never a given that the most rational outcome will prevail.

Tim Farrar is president of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, a consulting and research firm in Menlo Park, Calif., which specializes in technical and financial analysis across the satellite and telecom sectors.He blogs on wireless and satellite issues at tmfassociates.com; follow him on Twitter @TMFAssociates.

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The hardware

First, here’s all you need to know about the new hardware in a nutshell: Sling has been an innovator in the space of place shifting, making it possible to stream your TV signal from your cable box to PCs and mobile devices inside and outside of your house. That’s pretty much what the new hardware offers as well, with some added bells and whistles: The new Slingbox 350 is an entry-level model that sells for $180. It’s essentially like the older Slingbox solo, but with a more compact form factor. Also new: Up to 1080p streaming and an integrated IR blaster, so you won’t have to fiddle with extra cables and anymore to control your set-top-box.

The new Slingbox 500.

The Slingbox 500 adds an HDMI connection to the mix, making it possible to daisy-chain it between your cable box and your TV – something that may look familiar to anyone who has ever checked out a Google TV device. And it has two USB ports, which will eventually offer the option to add external storage for personal media – more on that later. Sling has also redone its software, offering new players for mobile devices and the option to beam photo slideshows straight to your TV.

The value proposition

Sling’s media team recently invited me to a demo and briefing about the new units, and their pitch sounded pretty compelling. The basic gist of it: The Internet was supposed to make TV more convenient, but it got actually more complicated. You’ve got apps from operators that work inside your house, but not on the go, apps that have some content but not other shows and apps that work on some carriers, but not elsewhere “This isn’t TV Everywhere. This is TV all over the place,” Sling’s Vice President of Marketing Jay Tannenbaum told me.

Sling thinks that it’s instead easier to get back to the basic idea of place-shifting, which makes your entire TV subscription content available everywhere. Of course, this means that you still need a traditional TV subscription – Slingboxes have never really been about cord cutting, and the new iteration is even less so, as none of the new models features an integrated ATSC tuner capable of receiving over-the-air broadcasts. Sling plans to eventually sell an USB adapter for that purpose, but Sling’s Senior Vice President and General Manager Raghu Tarra told me that over-the-air usage in the past has been “in the single digits.”

The actual experience

Sling send me review units of both devices to test, which made me wonder: who of my friends still has cable? Eventually I found someone gracious enough to host me in his living room for a few hours, and I thanked him by unhooking all of his TV equipment – only to stumble onto a number of bumps on the road. I concentrated on the more capable Slingbox 500 with its HDMI ports – but quickly found out that HDMI simply wouldn’t work with the setup I had at my disposal.

The problem: Some TV operators encrypt the digital signal on HDMI, something that’s known as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. And in my case, using a Motorola set-top box leased by Comcast, every single channel seemed to be encrypted. Sling is anticipating these hick-ups and thus asking consumers to also connect the box via component cables.

These can theoretically transmit 1080p as well, but it’s unclear if every set-top box will serve 1080p via component. There is definitely one added step of converting the signal to analog and then back to digital, and in my case, the signal looked considerably worse. That alone is kind of a deal breaker for something you would permanently make part of all of your big screen TV viewing.

The other problem is that this fallback hook-up makes the whole set-up unnecessarily complicated, in my case adding probably an extra 40 minutes as I tried to figure out what exactly was going on with the HDMI signal. Said my host: “I would have put it back in the box 30 minutes ago.”

The bigger issue

Of course, I may have stumbled across the worst-case scenario. The Sling folks told me that Dish, for example, only encrypts its HBO channel via HDCP, and they hope that even that will eventually go away. “We don’t crack HDCP,” said Tannenbaum, adding that the company’s own encryption of streams could help to get studios more comfortable with place shifting. “We hope that this will open up a dialog,” he said.

But the bigger issue seems to me that Sling got its value proposition backward. It is launching with new devices that out of the box don’t add that much functionality over the previous generation. Sure, 1080p is nice, but matters little on a phone screen, and just a little more on an iPad.

Meanwhile, viewing has evolved, and the traditional place shifting approach may not work as well anymore as it used to. In many households, people are now watching multiple programs on multiple screens at the same time, with only one of them being a TV, and others including iPads and laptops. But with place shifting, everyone is still watching the same – your cable box simply can’t serve more than one stream, no matter the cable connecting it to the Slingbox.

Sling potentially has some solutions for these problems, as I was told that the box will eventually get access to a VOD service. The company is also looking into second-screen functionality, making use of the fact that its boxes are sitting in between your cable box and your TV, which could allow all kinds of overlays. However, don’t expect the Slingbox to turn into a full-blown media streaming device with a plethora of apps. “We don’t think the world needs another app store,” said Tannenbaum.

Where’s the vision?

And then there is the personal media angle. The new boxes include functionality for Airplay-like photo slide shows from your mobile devices, and I was shown advanced functionality that inlcudes the ability to constantly synch all of your mobile phone’s personal media to a hard drive attached to your Slingbox – and then consume it on any screen. That’s neat, but doesn’t seem world changing. I already have two services backing up all my camera phone photos to the cloud, and a NAS for local copies. So why add yet another media hub to the mix?

Sure, you might say, that’s you – and admittedly, I’m not the average consumer (and being a cord cutter, not part of Sling’s target audience anyway). But I’d argue that the average consumer won’t spend $300 on a Slingbox either. Instead, they’re gonna just install the HBO Go app, and their cable company’s app, and find that it works well enough, despite all of the aforementioned shortcomings.

What’s missing from the new generation of Slingboxes is a vision. Something grand, something that would change TV like place shifting and time shifting have done in the past. The Slingbox 500 may technically be capable of delivering this, but and may get much better over time – but with its current iteration, it’s just a slightly updated version of something that was cool four years ago.

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SlingPlayer Mobile for iPad delivers a higher-resolution image tailored to Apple’s 9.7-inch tablet screen, and features a redesigned program guide using native iPad UI elements. You also get a recent channel feature that provides a heck of a lot more versatility than that “Last” button on your remote. SlingPlayer Mobile works over both Wi-Fi and 3G, although in my brief experience with the iPhone app, quality degrades considerably outside of your home network.

The app is one of the higher-priced, consumer-focused ones we’ve seen yet in the iTunes store, at $29.99. Users who’ve already paid $29.99 for the iPhone app will likely be disappointed that Sling Media opted to release a separate app instead of introducing universal support to the existing software to make it compatible with both. In its official PR release, Sling suggests that iPhone app owners can continue to use it in “Compatibility Mode” if they’d rather not pay for the app a second time.

I question Sling Media’s decision to ask users pay a full $30 a second time over for an app, since many of those looking to buy the iPad version will likely already have the iPhone one. It seems especially risky now that Netflix and Hulu Plus make streaming from cable and satellite sources less of a priority for many iPad owners. Anyone planning on ponying up for iPad access?

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The release of the Sling-enabled DVR has been a long time coming: the set-top box was first announced more than a year ago at CES. And its availability comes two and a half years after Echostar bought Sling Media for $380 million.

The SlingLoaded DVR is key to Dish Network’s TV Everywhere strategy, which will enable Dish customers to watch live and recorded TV that they’ve already paid for from PCs and mobile devices such as the iPhone and Blackberrys.

Unlike Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other cable companies, which are pitching TV Everywhere services through on demand video portals that require authentication, Dish’s approach cuts out the need for service providers and TV programmers to create separate web sites for subscribers to view content. Furthermore, Sling-enabled DVRs will make all linear and recorded video content available to a subscriber on external devices, not just an on-demand library of content that is chosen by cable programmers and dependent on licensing agreements they have with rights holders.

Dish will begin taking orders for the ViP922 SlingLoaded DVR this week. In addition to the $699 initial price point, Dish subscribers will be charged a $10 DVR fee for use of the SlingLoaded DVR, as opposed to the $6 fee for standard DVR usage.

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“TV Everywhere” has become the industry’s go-to term for describing multi-service operators’ plans to make more premium TV content accessible online to those with a pay TV subscription. Though individual companies will have their own branded flavor of TV Everywhere, the moniker has become a catch-all.

When the broader industry uses the term “TV Everywhere” it describes a relationship between the multi-service operator and its programming partners to deliver content across multiple screens. In Dish’s case, it’s Sling-enabled set-top boxes allow people to placeshift their live or DVRd content.

Last month, EchoStar, which sells hardware and satellite services, started pitching its Sling-based set-top solution to cable companies. According to EchoStar, the placeshifting technology would give MSO subscribers TV Everywhere without the MSO needing to get into all of those agreements with the programmers.

Dish filed for the TV Everywhere trademark with the USPTO on Sept. 17, and the filing covers “television transmission services” and “providing access to electronic sites for remote access, recording, and viewing of television programming via personal computers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers.”

Trademark or no, we’re still going to use the term “TV Everywhere” a lot at this week’s NewTeeVee Live conference.

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Clicker is backed by veteran venture capitalists Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures, who have invested $8 million in the company. Clicker is going to be unveiling its service to the world at our NewTeeVee Live conference, which will be held on Nov. 12 in San Francisco. (To buy tickets for the conference, click here. ) Liz covered the company in The Best Guides to Watching TV Online. Continue reading at GigaOM.

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The Sling video streaming app, which allows users to stream video from a home set-top box to their iPhone, was forbidden from AT&T’s 3G network via a clause (altered numerous times) that currently bans “redirecting television signals for viewing on personal computers.” An AT&T representative confirmed that the Sling ban is in place over “congestion” concerns. However, all is not right in Mudville.

The concerns over congestion are valid — AT&T’s network needs all the help it can get — but does anyone really think that the MLB app, one of the most popular on the App Store, offering live streaming of baseball games isn’t going to have an effect on the network? AT&T is concerned about users running their Sling apps 24/7 and placing a huge (for one user, at least) drain on the 3G network. This is understandable. However, it seems that AT&T is not concerned with the congestion issues of MLB’s app — which will likely have many more users than Sling would, all watching during the same time period, placing a huge burden on the network. If AT&T is concerned about congestion from Sling, it seems logical that it would also be concerned about congestion from baseball.

Yes, it’s true that Sling could be used constantly and that baseball games are finite in length, but the sheer number of people who use the MLB app — plus the fact that games will be watched by many users simultaneously — suggests to me that the congestion concerns are comparable for both apps and that they should be treated similarly.

AT&T told me that the prohibition is on “the transferring, or slinging, of a TV signal to a PC or smartphone over 3G.” Is this not what the MLB app does as well? It will be the same video that users of MLB’s desktop service get, and functionally the same video that someone watching baseball on cable or satellite would get. There does indeed seem to be a double standard between Sling and Major League Baseball.

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