I've had a Slingbox (which crashed after 18 months) and a Slingbox Pro, that Slingbox sold me for cost after the first Slingbox failure. While both of them have let me watch a lot of U.S. TV shows, football and baseball over the last 3 years, while on layovers, I can't in good conscience recommend the product.

The box freezes up and requires reseting, with my laptop computer hooked up to the home network, at least every other month. This almost invariably happens just as I start a 12 day Asia trip - very frustrating! I've also had to go through a full system reset three times in the last 18 months that required tech support - at $30 a pop. If you get one, I hope your wife is tech savy enough to be able to do a reset from home while you're on the road.

If you go to the Slingbox support page and look in the Slingbox Answers Forum you will see that I am far from the only person who has had problems keeping the dang thing working. http://answers.slingbox.com/communit...x/slingbox_pro

There are a couple of other options to Slingbox out there now. There is a competitor that I have been looking at called the Monsoon Vulkano. They have three different boxes including a $149 direct competitor with the Sling Pro, and a $315 version that has a DVR and 500 GB hard drive built in, that has all kinds of additional capabilities. They're just getting to the market and getting mixed reviews, so I may wait a while and let them get the bugs out.

Another option is what I've been using for the last few weeks. I have Comcast cable and they've just come out with Xfinity, which lets you watch most TV shows, but just not live - kinda like Hulu. But, like Hulu, you can't watch live TV and you can't log on from overseas. Unlike Hulu though, I can logon to Xfinity using my free Anchorfree Hotspot Shield VPN, that gets me on the internet from a US server.

In short, don't just focus on Slingbox - there are other options available.