Slingbox, video streaming long before it's cool, dark tomorrow

Enlarge / The original Slingbox, on display at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Key indicators that were a long time ago include the Toshiba Satellite laptop computer used for the demo (and buttons shiny giants of the user interface). Getty Images

Slingbox, the device and service that streamed digital TV long before the world was ready for it, will die a cloud-based server death on Wednesday, November 9. The service was almost 17 years old.< /p>

Sling Media announced two years ago that Slingbox would be discontinued, noting that "all Slingbox devices and services will become unusable." The reason given was the drop in demand. Being able to watch the video that would normally be on your TV on a non-TV screen was a new and legally controversial thing when Sling started in 2005. Today there is more content than you can watch in a lifetime. , available on devices that can connect from almost anywhere, offered voluntarily by all major media companies and sports leagues.

Sling grew out of two wealthy estates: General Magic, the Apple spin-off company where founder Blake Krikorian worked in the early 1990s, and San Francisco Giants baseball in 2002. Krikorian and his brother, Jason, traveled frequently at the time while building their own consultancy. The Giants were heading to the World Series that year, and the Krikorian brothers wanted to watch, or at least listen. They found that they were either locked into local broadcast deals or asked to pay additional fees to stream the games on top of the cable and internet they had already paid for at home.

TiVo existed back then, but it could only play what you recorded on the same TV. The Slingbox, as the name suggests, could project your home's wired video onto the internet anywhere you could access it. It wasn't long after the launch of the Slingbox that companies providing this video took notice.

"Will Hollywood sue the SlingBox so that it no longer exists?" was the title of Ars in April 2006. The strongest hand the content companies could play was their retransmission agreements, which Sling had not signed. Sling CEO Blake Krikorian (died 2016) said in 2006 that offbeat video "is one of the technologies that will help broadcasters stay relevant these days". Nate Anderson of Ars wrote at the time that "if broadcasters were really interested in getting their product to as many people as possible, the SlingBox wouldn't even exist: the networks would already be streaming their content on the internet." p>

There's been a lot of hemming, and a lot of hawing, including from sports league crowds so traveling sports fans can see games they normally would have missed because they weren't. on the market. Later, when 3G and the iPhone introduced devices that made watching TV on your phone somewhat reasonable, AT&T forced Sling to block 3G devices from accessing Sling devices on the carrier's network. .