How many people slingbox

In its early years, Sling made deals with pay-TV operators to feature its watch-anywhere technology. Those deals were predicated to some extent on the traditional pay-TV bundle. They merely layered on extra charges at the same time Netflix and Amazon were beginning to stream a wide array of shows and customers were growing restless about the cord.

The news left most tech observers and fans a bit wistful. Here are some of the initial reactions:. When I die, I want the people from Slingbox to be my pallbearers so they can let me down one last time. The greatest invention no one ever heard of is dead. But now I can't recall the last time I used my M2 model, which I didn't even bother to connect when I moved into my current home nearly five years ago.

I haven't connected my M2 Slingbox model in at least five years. When word got around that Slingbox manufacturing was coming to an end back in , Jason Krikorian posted on Facebook that he was "slightly bummed" about the news, but was likewise "amazed that the product was still being produced 10 years after the acquisition But more than three years later, it's now clear that the Slingbox's run is about to enter the home stretch.

Those who followed the Slingbox story from the beginning also know that the Krikorian brothers were inspired to create the Slingbox by their desire to watch the San Francisco Giants on TV when they were on the road. And that technology, as it turns out, would come in supremely handy. But at this benefit concert they had a bunch of older bands and stuff and Billy Idol was on stage. I don't think Billy Idol was very good, but there was this moment when he got this tremendous applause and I'm convinced he thought his career was possibly renewed at this show.

Little did he know that it was this group of folks who were cheering that the Giants won the Series. The Krikorian brothers' presumptive sports-oriented use-case was spot-on, as catching my favorite teams on the go was what drove my Slingbox usage — back when, you know, I was still using it at all. Back in , the Slingbox put a bit of a scare in the cable industry with respect to their video and broadband businesses.

Michael Harris, the founder of Cable Digital News sold to Light Reading in , had a prescient understanding of what the Slingbox would mean to the cable industry when it was first foisted upon the world. The Slingbox, he wrote here on LR , "is yet another innovative 'over-the-top' product that leverages cable programming and the broadband IP pipe that will spook MSOs This technology, if bundled with digital cable and high-speed data service, could be a powerful consumer offering.

MSOs need to get their arms around the programming rights issues and figure out how to offer it directly to subscribers. The original Slingbox also caused the cable industry to worry about its weak upstream capacity and forced some network engineers to give more thought to the deployment of and support for DOCSIS 2. However, Slingbox never was adopted widely enough by consumers to create a huge, immediate issue for the cable industry. But, fast-forwarding to , and the cable upstream is getting plenty of attention again during a pandemic that has forced people to work and school from home and tap into upstream-intensive apps such as videoconferencing at historic levels.

But he gives YouTube TV, and its estimated 4 million subs, the negotiating edge. Amid an influx of new, premium content, the free ad-supported streaming TV — or FAST — market is poised to generate million monthly active users by , a new study finds. Furthermore, some outdated apps might just disappear from app stores altogether.

Sling Media is still supporting users who are currently under warranty, which is valid for one year. As long as the customer bought the Slingbox from an authorized retailer, like Walmart or Best Buy, and still has a copy of the receipt, the warranty will be valid.

Actually, it appears that it has been working on bringing something new and innovative to its customers for quite some time now. For example, Sling Media apps have been going offline since the latter part of Both the paid and free apps for Android tablets, and the paid version of the smartphone app, went offline in December of last year.

The Roku app went offline three months beforehand, in September. Some Slingplayer apps are still currently available, including both the free and paid versions of the iPad app.