I actually didn’t get very far into the Sands exhibition area this morning ... I wound up spending too much time at the jammed Sling Media booth, which seemed even bigger than last year. The company’s product line is larger, too, including a cable modem with Sling capability built in (no deals yet), Sling Pro HD, room-to-room SlingCatcher. The latter two are scheduled to ship in Q2; Sling Mobile for Blackberry was being demoed but no release date. An updated version of Clip+Sling, announced at CES last year but not yet released, drew a lot of attention.

The visitors were almost as interesting. While I was there the size of the already substantial crowd doubled when a group of cable programming execs on a CTAM tour stopped by for a briefing with Sling’s Jason Krikorian. The operators were there the previous day and I believe CableLabs stopped by Monday. Sling is tricky for the cable industry: programmers are concerned about rights and the ways content may be used; programmers and operators are concerned about the implications of location shifting outside their control; operators aren’t sure what to make of Sling’s acquisition by Charlie Ergen’s EchoStar (NSDQ: DISH). (That last could get an assist from this month’s split of EchoStar into a satellite provider and a tech holding company.) At the same time, they’re aware that Slingboxes have caught consumer interest—some of them have at least one of their own—and that Sling Media is already offering some of the features they’ve been working on for years.

Watching this group reminded me of someone looking at an aquarium, trying to figure out whether the fancy fish swimming around is friendly or the kind that eats the others.