The Slingbox met its sunset Wednesday when corporate parent Dish Network turned off the servers that enabled these boxes to stream TV from customers’ homes to their current whereabouts.
Dish announced this move on Nov. 9, 2020, saying in a FAQ then “We’ve had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible.” That page now says “we took the Slingbox servers permanently offline November 9, 2022.”
When it debuted in 2005 as a $250 device to plug into a TV, cable box, digital video recorder or other video source, the original Slingbox served as an HDMI cable in the sky, allowing you to control and view that source’s video from a distant Windows PC.
Setting one up wasn’t easy. On the unit I tried, it was borderline infuriating, but once configured it delivered a kind of magic. As the Wall Street Journal’s Wall Mossberg wrote then: “It is a very good product that finally makes TV place shifting a reality.”
It happened because the company’s founders were frustrated sports fans.
“We were traveling quite a bit in the summer of 2002 and we were pretty diehard San Francisco Giants fans,” CEO Blake Krikorian told Engadget in 2005. “We were on the road and just dying to watch the ballgames.”
But even among the nascent streaming video options available, he didn’t have any good ways to watch his team during the season that ended in a gut-punch World Series loss.
“I said, you know, I'm paying $80 a month for cable, and for high-speed data in and out of my home,” said Krikorian, who got to see his Giants finally win it all in 2010, 2012, and 2014 before dying way too soon of a heart attack in 2016. “Why can't I just watch and control my living-room TV wherever I am?”
The Slingbox and successor devices like 2008’s Slingbox Solo and 2014’s Slingbox M1 became popular among a certain set of frequent travelers and sports fans. As Washington Capitals and Wizards owner Ted Leonsis tweeted in November of 2015: “Dinner on the road with Slingbox watching #CapsJets and #WizHornets ...waiter thinks we are nuts.”
Dish Network parent EchoStar bought Sling Media for about $380 million in 2007, then slapped that brand on the Sling TV streaming service it launched in 2015. That’s how the name lives on today, along with the difficulty of streaming your home team’s baseball games.
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