Sling Media and Symbian partner to bring personal TV home viewing to consumers

The Symbian Smartphone Show, London, UK– 17 October 2006 — Sling Media, Inc., a digital lifestyle consumer electronics products company and Symbian, the market-leader in open operating systems for smartphones, today announced that the two companies are partnering to bring consumers a powerful mobile TV experience to Symbian smartphones.

Sling Media will deliver a version of its popular SlingPlayer Mobile software application, currently available only in the U.S. and Canada, for Symbian OS in select European and Asian countries during Q4 and will extend availability to the U.S. shortly thereafter. Unlike other offerings available on the market today, SlingPlayer Mobile delivers customers’ complete home TV experience on mobile handsets using standard network connections, including 3G cellular and WiFi.

The new SlingPlayer Mobile for Symbian OS software package will enable users to transform their supported Symbian smartphones on S60 and UIQ into personal, on-the-go digital TVs providing anytime, anywhere access to their living room television experience. Any program that can be watched at home will be viewable through a Slingbox on supported Symbian smartphones using 3G or WiFi, including support for terrestrial TV, Freeview, cable, and satellite TV. In addition, SlingPlayer Mobile lets users control their home personal video recorder (PVR) to watch recorded shows, pause, and rewind live TV or even queue new recordings while away from home.

Sling Media
"Symbian’s market leading position drove our decision to work with them and deliver the Slingbox experience to a large mobile customer base,” said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media."People love their living room TV programming and simply want the ability to watch it on any device wherever they happen to be, whether at work on their PC, around the home on their wireless laptop, or on the go via their mobile phone. I've been using a beta version of the SlingPlayer Mobile on a Symbian smartphone, and it's pure sweetness."

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world’s leading handset manufacturers. To date, over 82 million Symbian smartphones have been sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators. According to Gartner, Symbian accounted for about 71 percent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2006.

Symbian
"Symbian works collaboratively with its licensees and partners to foster innovation and set trends for new smartphone features and capabilities, thereby expanding the market for 3G-based multimedia applications,” said Jerry Panagrossi, vice president, US operations, Symbian. “SlingPlayer Mobile is a breakthrough in mobile TV viewing that captures the essence of the new smartphone lifestyle, representing a new level of interaction with the world and immediacy for information and entertainment.”

The combined mobile TV experience is driven by Sling Media’s breakthrough product, the Slingbox. The Slingbox redirects, or “placeshifts,” a single live TV stream from a standard or Freeview cable connection, cable box, satellite receiver or PVR to the viewer’s 3G handset or PC located anywhere in the home or anywhere in the world.

About Sling Media

Sling Media, Inc. is a digital lifestyle products company creating a family of consumer electronics solutions that are a natural extension of today’s digital way of life. The first member of the Sling Media family is the award-winning Slingbox™, a device that allows consumers to access their living room television experience at any time, from any location, using a variety of different displays including laptops and desktop PCs, PDAs and smartphones. For more information on Sling Media or the Slingbox www.slingmedia.com

About Symbian

Symbian is a software licensing company that develops and licenses Symbian OS, the market leading open operating system for advanced, data-enabled mobile phones, also known as smartphones.

Symbian licenses Symbian OS to the world’s leading handset manufacturers and has built close co-operative business relationships with leading companies across the mobile industry. During H1 2006, 24 million Symbian OS phones were sold worldwide to over 250 major network operators, bringing the total number of Symbian OS phones shipped to 82.8 million.

Symbian has its headquarters in London, United Kingdom with offices in the United States, Europe (England and Sweden (UIQ Technology AB)), Israel and Asia (India, P.R. China, Korea, and Japan).

SlingMedia
Sling Media, Inc.
Brian Jaquet
+1 (650) 293-8022 US +44 (0)79 6258 4986 UK
jaquet@slingmedia.com

mobile AxiCom
Lucy Brake
+44 20 8392 4085
lucy.brake@axicom.com

Axicom
Jeff Prior
+44 20 8392 4077
lewis.webb@axicom.com

Media Enquiries

HQ - UK Symbian Ltd +442071541383 press@symbian.com	Valerie Breslow US +1 858 337 4217 valbreslow@earthlink.net
Aleks Vujanic Europe Burson-Marsteller UK +44 20 7300 6299 symbian_pressuk@uk.bm.com	Hiroko Tanaka Burson-Marsteller Japan +81 3 3264 6727 symbian_pr@jp.com

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