Today, you can fire up any number of streaming video services and watch content instantly on a supercomputer that lives in your pocket, but things weren’t always so easy. In 2005, the Slingbox gave us a preview of a streaming video world, and this iconic device is now history. Sling has disabled the Slingbox servers, rendering the plucky set-top box little more than a doorstop.
The Slingbox was born in an era when cable was still king, and TV providers were actively avoiding online streaming. Founders Blake and Jason Krikorian came up with the idea as a consequence of their San Francisco Giants fandom. They were frustrated they couldn’t watch pivotal games while traveling, and Slingbox was born. The idea was novel: Plug in your cable TV wire, connect to the internet, and bam — on-demand streaming of your cable TV channels over the internet. Content owners were not happy with the company, and lawsuits piled up, but the future was inevitable.
The company released a few more variants of the Slingbox, but you couldn’t save any of the content you streamed. That capability arrived with the Dish Hopper DVR, which integrated Sling streaming in 2013. Again, there were lawsuits. CBS even ordered its CNET subsidiary not to cover the Hopper and revoke a “Best of CES” award. This led to a number of high-profile resignations from the site. In hindsight, broadcasters probably should have embraced the Slingbox — at least it required that people maintain their cable TV subscription, which today’s streaming services do not.
The Slingbox app came to the iPhone early on, but AT&T demanded it not operate over 3G.
It’s possible the Slingbox would have been smothered by legal challenges in time, but streaming video was already proliferating at an astonishing rate by the early 2010s. Netflix emerged as the main driver of bandwidth usage during peak viewing hours, and it became commonplace for people to catch up on content with Hulu. Sling shifted to its Sling TV offering in 2015, which works within the guardrails set up by content providers and doesn’t require a set-top box. Today, it competes with services like Hulu and YouTube TV.
Anyone who has held onto their Slingbox all these years has been able to continue using it, but that’s over now. As promised, Sling has shut off the servers that mediated the video stream, leaving the apps unable to connect. There are some third-party tools like Slinger that aim to route video around the Sling servers, but for all intents and purposes, the Slingbox is dead.
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