More or less -- they can only watch what you're watching (or you can only watch what they're watching). The Slingbox takes the analog output from your DVR, just like your television, and streams it over the internet to the client on your remote computer.

we've been living in Singapore for a few months and over Christmas were back at our house in the US. I bought a Slingbox for my wife and used the opportunity to get it set up and running well. There are a few things you can do to reduce the cons, the easiest being to shell out the additional $10 per month to your cable company for a dedicated cablebox/dvr for your slingbox.
I havent done much tweaking and tuning yet, but am pretty happy with the results. We bought the basic model for about $100US and wanted to make sure it worked at all, now we'll probably upgrade to the HD model (our cable company has a fair amount of HD programming) on our next trip home.
I just downloaded the slingplayer for my mobile phone, havent tried it yet, but am not expecting too much there!!

Thanks for the reply, sorry about the delay, Yea that's my max. upload, although I do have 3Mb down. The beauty of ADSL!:(

why not
 

why don't you expect much, this is one of the great points of the SP, is the mobile app. I use it on a treo 700wx, a ppc 6700 and my ipaq hx4700, all work GREAT, even just over EVDO. Oh yeah, #1 1K GF uses it on her DASH, it works great there too. Full screen, just audio, whichever one chooses.