You have 500 channels and 300 hours of TiVo. You can watch anything you want—until you leave home. Then it’s a hotel TV with 20 random choices. It can make even the most itinerant traveler homesick. That’s why Sling Media’s Blake Krikorian brought forth the Slingbox last June. The souped-up set-top box transmits shows from your TV to your laptop, with air vents on its top spelling out what the device offers: “My cable TVmy DVDmy radio anywhere.” Already pay for MLB’s Extra Innings package on DirecTV? Now you don’t have to pay again to watch games on the Web— just hook the Slingbox up to your home broadband network and link up to it via the Internet. The SlingPlayer software on your laptop gradually (but unnoticeably) slows down playback, creating a six-second buffer to compensate for glitches. You can even change channels with a virtual remote control that looks exactly like the one back home.

BOTTOM LINE: The Slingbox can now be found in 3,000 stores nationwide, and sales in the first seven months outpaced those of TiVo following the latter’s launch in 1999.