Pressing the Mode button on the remote brings up a bar along the bottom of the screen confirming that the stream is active. It also brings up a readout of the current streaming bit rate. While watching this blocky podcast, the SlingCatcher reported a stream bandwidth of around 290 Kbps, give or take 5 Kbps. That’s not much more than the 200+ Kbps we observed when the PC was paused on a black screen. However, when we switched to a 1080-resolution trailer for "Terminator 2," the stream skyrocketed to between 6,500 and 7,000 Kbps. The highest numbers we saw barely topped 9,000 Kbps. (No wonder Sling advises you to have a minimum sustained LAN connection of 5 Mbps.) At this data rate, the results were spectacular. The quality was only slightly less clear than when watching native HD television. Colors were vibrant, sharpness was excellent, and the audio was perfect. Every once in a while, a dropped frame told us that we were watching a recording rather than live, but it was still stunning. Note that if you leave overlaid objects on a projected window, such as Sling’s own Projector icon, they get “slinged” to the TV, too.