Love Of The Box

After raving on about Sling a couple of years ago, regular readers of this blog will notice that I've gone very quiet about this pioneering company.

There are a couple of reasons: acquisition of the company by US satellite company EchoStar seems to have resulted in an inevitable concentration on the US market. Secondly, my box refused to work with Virgin's + box no matter what I tried.

In reality, Sling is a gadget freak's toy. When it works it's very cool, although does depend on your upstream bandwidth, so quality was always an issue.

Now, news reaches me that Sling are launching a UGC portal as well as featuring on demand content. In other words, they're making a play for the second box market alongside PS3, XBox, loads of ISPs and many others.

If I were Sling I would focus my efforts on an OEM software product that you can sell to the above and to screen manufacturers and PC vendors. But the 1950s view that having a box in customers' houses is a way to make money prevails.