Dish To Shut Down Slingbox, Devices Will Become 'Inoperable' In 2022 (variety.com) 52
Dish Network announced that it will permanently shut down all of Sling Media's Slingbox services and end support for the devices in two years, at which point they'll no longer work. Variety reports: On Monday, Dish's Sling Media unit announced that Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months from Nov. 9, 2020. "Until then, most Slingbox models will continue to work normally, but the number of supported devices for viewing will steadily decrease as versions of the SlingPlayer apps become outdated and/or lose compatibility," the company said in a message posted Monday.
In an FAQ about the shutdown, Dish said Slingbox is being discontinued because "We've had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible." Sling will not be releasing any new products; most authorized resellers have been out of stock of the Slingbox devices "for a couple years," according to the company. Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar in 2007 for $380 million, which at the time was Dish's parent company. Years before Netflix became a streaming powerhouse, the Slingbox "place-shifting" devices let customers watch pay-TV channels over the internet. But the products never became a mainstream category in the way streaming-media players like Roku and Amazon's Fire TV have.
In an FAQ about the shutdown, Dish said Slingbox is being discontinued because "We've had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible." Sling will not be releasing any new products; most authorized resellers have been out of stock of the Slingbox devices "for a couple years," according to the company. Sling Media was acquired by EchoStar in 2007 for $380 million, which at the time was Dish's parent company. Years before Netflix became a streaming powerhouse, the Slingbox "place-shifting" devices let customers watch pay-TV channels over the internet. But the products never became a mainstream category in the way streaming-media players like Roku and Amazon's Fire TV have.
Usual corporate BS and flannel (Score:5, Insightful)
"We've had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible"
Translation: "We're no longer making enough money out of this and we've decided to hopefully rinse our customers for a full hardware upgrade, sorry, we mean serve them!"
If they were honest and said, "look, you've had 13 years but its a non viable service now" I think people would have more respect.
Re:Usual corporate BS and flannel (Score:5, Interesting)
What about releasing the server software as open source? That way users may have a chance to get the service running again on their own resources. I say "may" because I don't know the technical details. Or if a developer community willing to maintain the product would exist.
Either way, it is not like Slingbox would lose any money there, if they won't sell the devices anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
AFAIK its a phone-home type system so just having the OS for the box won't do you much good if the backend has shut down.
Re: (Score:1)
That's why I wrote "the server software". The part that still runs on the servers right now would be the part that needs to become open source. The OS for the box would have to be opened to the point where you can reconfigure it to connect to a private server.
Bonus points if both would become completely open source.
Re: (Score:3)
Who would put up money to run the server?
Who would invest the time needed to create an upgraded image for the boxes, and distribute it?
How many users would be bothered to install the upgrade? How many users are there actually left?
Providing the source for something does not mean that somebody would actually take the time to do anything about it.
The world is full of abandoned open source projects...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I would run it in my own house off of my own OTA antenna just so I don't have to run coax to the basement.
Re: (Score:2)
The HDHomeRun will fit this bill.
Personally, I like running that in combination with Plex as I really like Plex's DVR system and the automatic commercial removal. The ability to stream the content to my phone when I am out of the house is a nice bonus as well.
If you go with Plex and the Plex server is close to where you antenna is going to be you could do what I did and save a few dollars by using a USB tuner instead of the HDHomeRun. I use a Hauppauge 1657 at my house. A good friend of mine uses the HDHome
Re: (Score:2)
These things originally were peer to peer. I think they went *cloud* for two reason. Making discovery and working around NAT simple, but also to satisfy the legal people it was not just a piracy tool and users really had some kind of tv subscription.
I don't know about dish but from a features perspective this is already implemented in everyone elses DVR packages. While Xfinitity does let you stream your own recordings, the app subtly pushed you to use the streaming options it provides for nation wide cable
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Just plug the HDHomeRun into your antenna and network, Plex found it scanned the channels, and even presents a nice guide.
Plex makes anything recorded pretty easily available to any of our devices in the house, or even out of (if I were so inclined to enable that).
Re: (Score:2)
another reason to not by IOT devices. ... alexa shutup... google i was not talking to you hive i said turn down the heat not up.
Re:Usual corporate BS and flannel (Score:4, Insightful)
If they were honest and said, "look, you've had 13 years but its a non viable service now" I think people would have more respect.
Honesty is why companies decided to create public relations and stop engineers from talking to customers.
Re: (Score:2)
If they were honest
I think the same but it seems we are unusual. Marketing "research" has repeatedly shown that a company's image and their top line is less impacted when they wrap bad news in these meaningless feel-good statements. You can question whether that is the marketing people keeping marketing people in demand, or you can look at it as brass polishing, but that isn't going to keep companies from following it.
Another cloud product vanishes... (Score:5, Informative)
... leaving a bunch of useless hardware behind.
Slingbox used to not require cloud, you could just open your own firewall port or VPN into the home. Then some MBA decided it's a great idea to force all customers to the cloud (yes, firmware upgraded and suddenly you had to have an slingbox account, could no longer connect directly). Now the customers will be left with electronics junk on their hands. At least they could re-enable the direct connection to the slingbox which doesn't require the cloud they're not willing to support.
Re: Another cloud product vanishes... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Another cloud product vanishes... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
There's no profit in just shutting down the service and bricking the devices either,
You are wrong. There is no profit for you but there is for them. Fist off, they have already profited from the service and the devices. If the service is costing them money now or is on a path to being a money losing operation, then shutting it down provides profit by reducing costs. If they have a stake in one or more services that compete with slingbox, then shutting down slingbox removes an operational cost and increases the value of the competing service(s).
Re:Another cloud product vanishes... (Score:5, Informative)
You can replace it with an off-the-shelf device but another option exists now. Get a Raspberry Pi or similar, connect up USB tuners and install tvhheadend. With an open port or better a VPN you can then stream video, set up DVR functionality, get the programme guide over the air etc.
tvheadend is a great way to distribute TV around your house too. No need for coax everywhere, just use ethernet or wifi. Cheap £20 Android TV box will receive it, or some TVs have Android TV built in now.
Re: (Score:2)
Not quiet the solution for me, but thanks. My sling usage is having it connected to a TiVo, allowing me to watch pre-recorded shows, as well as streaming services while traveling outside to different regions without worrying about regional restrictions. I'd have to get some sort of HDMI input card and an IR or BT remote controller transmitter connected to the Rpi, then find or write some software to operate it all remotely. One useful feature of sling I enjoyed was real-time adaptive bitrate/resolution stre
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can replace it with an off-the-shelf device but another option exists now. Get a Raspberry Pi or similar, connect up USB tuners and install tvhheadend. With an open port or better a VPN you can then stream video, set up DVR functionality, get the programme guide over the air etc.
tvheadend is a great way to distribute TV around your house too. No need for coax everywhere, just use ethernet or wifi. Cheap ã20 Android TV box will receive it, or some TVs have Android TV built in now.
TVH is awesome with none of the BS. If you don't already have a spare Linux system to install it on a cheap HC1/HC2 works great.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
you could just open your own firewall port or VPN into the home. Then some MBA decided
Let me stop you right there. No that wasn't some MBA that decided. That was years of fucking inaction by tech companies that led to the development of NAT and the breaking of the end-to-end concept of internet connected devices.
As soon as you require a user to do *anything* on their firewall or router, or use an acronym you've lost. You product is instantly too difficult to deal with an decried as utter garbage not suitable for consumption by a non-technical audience.
MBAs didn't force customers into the clo
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're partly right, though maybe not with SlingBox which used to work when I pointed it directly to an IP and port - worked great via VPN back to my house. Then someone decided to require (not optional) a cloud account, but cloud couldn't traverse my firewall and wouldn't relay so I would have to open a port in the firewall in order to use the cloud. I instead still used it over VPN because I didn't want to be putting Sling directly on the internet. So, I had to VPN back into the home, connect from
Re: (Score:2)
Given the cloud is only service as a dynamic DNS service in the end, it really isn't necessary.
Slingbox smarts are all in the device - the hardware encoders and all that are on device, and the cloud service maps a slingbox serial number to an IP address so the app can connect to your slingbox.
There's only one real piece of information - how the slingbox app communicates with the slingbox - the cloud service isn't needed. And the app is what makes it useful, but there's nothing much beyond taking a data stre
Re: (Score:2)
Switching to ipv6 isn't going to help the problem. You still have a firewall to deal with, only now it's more critical that it is configured properly. The end user would still have to allow a connection in to the device even if NAT is not part of the equation. And we're back to "As soon as you require a user to do *anything* on their firewall or router, or use an acronym you've lost."
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely false. While not exactly secure solutions to let NAT work like UPNP exist.
The real technical problem was never 1 IP per household it was the fact those IPs are not very stable, thus required dynamic DNS - again forcing users to do something to hard as opposed to just learning 1 ipv4 number.
The real regulatory issue was letting ISP have TOS agreements that essentially forbade any kind of serve.
The real practical issues bandwidth to the edge largely meant radically asymmetric connections. Were lots
Re: (Score:2)
UPNP is not a solution, it's not bi-directional. You can't negotiate a connection between two endpoints using just UPNP to help get through a firewall, one side needs to be accessible and setup in a way that the other side knows. That's why the entire frigging cloud servers exist, long before we even started calling them "cloud". When Skype introduced a central server it was precisely a solution to this problem.
I blame the MBAs for giving people a product that they demanded works.
Re: Another cloud product vanishes... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Slingbox used to not require cloud, you could just open your own firewall port
Not all ISPs allow this now that IPv4 address space is exhausted. ISPs with more subscribers than IPv4 addresses use carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT), which gives the whole neighborhood a single public IPv4 address.
or VPN into the home.
VPN is cloud.
Stop buying cloud products... (Score:3)
I will never buy/own hardware that requires a connection to a cloud server in order to work. I use a 32" Samsung TV and a PVR that isn't even connected to the network for my over-the-air TV needs and I use my desktop PC for all my other viewing including YouTube, Netflix etc. None of the hardware I own (including my Nokia N900 phone) requires cloud servers in order to work.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I pretty much agree with you and do similar things, but I make an exception for the open-source-only SchedulesDirect [schedulesdirect.org], because otherwise over-the-air DVR usage is much more painful. Do you just get show information from the broadcast side-channel stream?
Re: (Score:2)
I get schedule information from the schedules that come over-the-air as part of the DVB-T digital signals and its good enough to use for those occasions when I want to record something (although if the show is available to stream on the TV network's website its easier to watch it there than to try and remember to record it :)
Re: (Score:3)
That's the problem right there. I was screwed over by this company when I bought it and it didn't have any cloud services. They then removed the good software they had and replaced it with software that had mandatory ads. I believe a lawsuit was launched over this, but I never heard anything about it. I even filed a BBB complaint that I, and many others had bought this product under certain expectations and those expectations and the company had purposefully and fundamentally changed the product to be worse
Boycott organisations that do this (Score:4, Insightful)
Phillips made an internet radio.
After a while they got bored with the idea and shutdown the channel server.
The radios were rendered useless.
- > I no longer buy Philips products.
( Happy Ending: The radios were hacked to be able to use your own channel server. No thanks to Philips. )
Alternatives? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Alternatives? (Score:1)
Award well earned (Score:3)
Seems that 2006 had been a bit early for the Disruptive Communications Technology Award which had been granted by the Financial Times. Still, it turns out it definitely wasn't undeserved after all!
Re: (Score:2)
Sad to hear (Score:1)
This is really sad to hear but I have not used my Slingbox since dropping cable.
Back in the late 2000s I was working at Best Buy and Slingbox gave me one to use at my house to show customers how the system worked. I had a HTC Touch Pro or a Touch Pro 2 and I remember being absolutely amazed at the technology. It gave me my cable TV service anywhere I was at and it worked extremely well.
Years later I started traveling across the country doing networking work and I continued to use Slingbox to watch TV, mainl
MythTV or SiliconDust (Score:2)
Re: MythTV or SiliconDust (Score:2)
They never will because "OMG! Piracy!(TM)".
And maybe "Think of the children(TM)" thrown in for good measure.
Yeah right (Score:2)
"We've had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible"
Other things that are just as truthful:
"Your call is very important to us"
"I won't cum in your mouth"
"I'll still respect you in the morning"
It will soon get to the point that even the slowest among us won't fall for the corporate spokesdroid drivel.
Rendering hardware useless should be illegal (Score:1)
I would support a law that required IOT makers to do one of the following when products come to EOL:
1) Open up the datasheets (or firmware) and encryption keys so that others can bring new life to the products
2) Recycling all their EOL products for several years to come.
The reason Dish canceled this is simple: Sling Tv (Score:2)
Sling Tv made this service redundant - not-only do they solve the "potential piracy" problem Sling suffered from, you also made it painless one-click setup (instead of futzing around getting your Cable DVR to talk to your Slingbox / paying the exorbitant price for the app on every device).
$20/month for all-in-one was a lot easier sell. (and as the world's most successful place-shifting live TV service, I would think it was a good reuse of the brand).
It sucks that the cloud is no-more, but you knew it would