RIP Slingbox! Testing the Original 2005 Slingbox in 2022
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- Опубліковано 6 лис 2022
- Sling Media servers will be permanently shut down and taken offline November 9, 2022. So it seemed like the perfect time to unbox this new old stock model from 2005 and test it out - before it's too late!
- Наука та технологія
Imagine how confused the two employees at SlingBox must be seeing a new device get connected to the server in 7 years
At least they have something to talk about... 🤦♂️
Probably didn’t notice whilst packing their desks up😂
Aww Darn , it looks Neat-O
🥹🥹🥹🥹
😂
I had an OG SlingBox, I installed it at my parents house before I moved from the UK to Canada (2009) so I could continue to watch live TV abroad, thanks to it's built in digital TV tuner. It ran flawlessly for years, until one day it died in 2016. Thanks for the memories!
They normally just don't die. The power adapters for these things are junk and mine died right away. I chose another 5v unit and it kept resetting itself randomly and thought it was just done for. Then I tied the slingbox to the 5v rail on a psu I have laying around to supply 12v to things that need it and it worked flawlessly for years until wednesday when its supposed to go offline permanently.
Damn your slingbox died the same year one of their co-founders passed away.
at least you can now just watch panel shows on youtube
This is heavy!
My brother had one of these and I used to connect to watch NY sports when I lived far away. I used to mess with him by randomly changing the channel from whatever game he was watching to Lifetime. 😂
This should be handed to the public domain. There are plenty of us that can keep servers going and help improve it via open source.
Would you even need to do that? It's not too hard to make a DIY version of this on a raspberry pi that just works as a media encoder for a video input.
@@coolbrotherf127 _Strawberry_ Pi?
@@dillis2188 meant raspberry pi, but my phone autocorrected to strawberry for some reason
@@coolbrotherf127 I figured - but I also wondered if there was some custom OS called Strawberry or something, and it got me googling. lol
@@dillis2188well there's orange pi, banana pi and whatnot
When I worked for Best Buy circa 2008 or so, they made us push those Slingboxes HARD. You were actually pulled aside and "coached" if you sold a TV without also attaching a Slingbox setup to the sale.
Lol, that does sound familiar
I worked at CompUSA at the time and we were told to push them, but not that hard. I remember a GIANT stack of these, maybe 40-50 near the front door. I personally only sold one in my time there and I think only 10 went out before the store closed.
I wonder how many customers they lost by having employees bear down on them to buy a system they don't want.
@@scott8919 More than they care to acknowledge
@@scott8919 "I wonder how many customers they lost (...)" Maybe wonder more about all the uninformed folk that actually get talked into buying this stuff.
its wild how well that whole setup worked out of the box, never heard of that product but it seems like its a very well made product.
you have to be under the age of 30 then. this thing was the bee's knees back in the day
@@sp2222222 I'm 31 this month and I barely remember having heard of this thing. I assume there was just 0 marketing.
@@sp2222222 This was an *incredibly* niche product with almost zero marketing.
@@sp2222222 I think it's also a mainly US thing. I'm european and I've never heard of it. I don't even think we had a Slingbox equivalent here, which makes it all the more fascinating
@@Erone I've got one over here in the UK....just never took it out the box lol
TiVo was the time shifting DVR device. The Slingbox was the first location shifting device. Both had zero restrictions on what you can do so they did everything you expected them to do. Now, both ideas had morphed into hardware-as-a-service, so you can't skip the commercials on the DVR service and you can't watch a TV channel if you're outside of the viewing market on the live TV streaming service. The closing of the Sling service is truly the end of an era.
I still have a TiVo and use it. You can still skip commercials. They even have people that put bookmarks on certain TV shows that you can hit the SKIP button and instantly get back to the program.
Now I just torrent anything I want to watch.
tivo you had to pay monthly for it and it long distanced the land line. boo! it didn't go over too great.
@@hardtymz2517 I've had TiVos since the beginning. Love them. The first ones connected to a land line to download the guide, but it only took a minute or two and where I live, it wasn't long distance. The new ones connect over ethernet or wifi for the guides. I bought an all-in plan for an extra $100 and it has a lifetime subscription without monthly fees.
@@hardtymz2517 I found an old recipe for land line phone service. I can't IMAGINE the long distance costs!
I had one of the big orange ones in college. I had it hooked up to my parents cable box at home so I could watch HBO on my dorm. I remember the latency of the IR controller being really bad. This was the early 2000’s version of sharing your streaming password with someone.
The Slingbox Pro. The only red one. Good memories
Na, this was the early 2000’s version of Plex. :)
@@Euph0rik9 yeah the 2000s version of sharing your Netflix account was out here I have that on VHS sure you can borrow it. If you like it make a copy. Oh you wanna see your son on TV here you go. Oh you missed your favorite show well I happen to watch that too what but time shifted here you go.....
@@imark7777777 aaah I sometimes taped the backhaul feeds of networks late at night to share with peeps in my school, back in the 80s and up until the late 90s networks and syndication companies would air all of their week of programing on a single night via satellite. Ooou you want the animaniacs shows for all week? just pop a tape in the VHS, tune in to the syndication feed on one of the Telstar satellites and hit record, best of all? no ads and the feeds didn't have any bugs on screen to identify what channel it was.
Tivo IR controllers were the same. Utterly useless. You would end up with recordings from the wrong channels.
I picked up the first HD version of this at a Goodwill within a year or two of its release for $5, back when Goodwills didn't bother looking up anything and just slapped prices on them and threw them into the electronics section.
I turned around and traded it for a wireless mouse and keyboard combo and a Sega Dreamcast with all of the cables, a few games, and two controllers and $50 is cash on Craigslist.
The good old days.
Thanks for the memories.
My dad had one of these,and I loved using it with my PSP. So many good memories with this, sad to see it shut down.
Did you hacked the PSP?
The only official way to do anything like that was through Sony Location Free Player.
@@NextNate03 i still have a Location free Player. I wonder if it still works.
@@samuelseidel6148 Sony actually had their own sort of Sling box thing, which was their Location Free boxes. The set up is essentially the exact same as with a Sling box where you have some inputs and passthrough to a TV, and have an IR blaster for controlling cable boxes and the like. The experience on the PSP is pretty neat, but the player is almost the exact same as the standard PSP video player, with the only change being the ability to use the IR blaster to control your device that the Location Free box is connected to. The PC application unfortunately doesn't work; the servers for license verification are all dead, so the only way to use the software is to find a trial version. Sony was quite stingy though so to actually use the trial version you need to change your computer's clock back to like 2006-2007 or so if I'm remembering right. I'm sure this was a way for Sony to make sure that nobody was using their trial version for too long by baking an end date into the installer itself. Anyways, the PC version works essentially the same as shown in the video, although I'd say it was considerably more stable. The boxes themselves are actually pretty interesting in their own right because they can also double as an access point among other things.
such a shame that everything is just planned obsolescence now...nothing is built to last or work longer than a certain amount of time...
LIving in Japan at the time and this was great for getting access to sports and shows from home. Different times!
Thanks for sharing this early model, that design is hilarious! Only the best folks test their Slingboxes with laserdisc players... and PDAs 😎💿
I used one with a Wii, does that count?
I'm pretty sure the design was so you could stack multiple boxes in the grooves since it can only do one source. So you get one for tv, one for dvd, etc.
Man, these were great. I lived overseas for ten years. When I was in China, the Slingbox was the only way to get uncensored news. I had many a party for either election nights, or the Super Bowl. While by today's standards this product is irrelevant, when I was using this in 2008 it was, quite frankly, a lifesaver. Great to see a product review on this, and sorry that the servers are being shut down, but it makes sense.
Congrats on bringing America across the great firewall! I bet some Chinese were extremely interested in the concept of streaming television from anywhere in the world, regardless of geographic region... I seriously hope dedicated servers come back online for this thing, as this allows people to watch un-restricted content in whatever region they happen to be in, just like they're home.
@@setoth1234 Winnie the Pooh doesn’t allow that
Uncensored news? Lmao boy we know u falling for media nonsense
@@qram281There's a pretty big difference between Chinese state media and U.S news, regardless of how you feel about it. If you can't see that, you're either blind or stupid.
@@SissypheanCatboy no it's the same everywhere...dont give a fox if u see that or not...goofy
Before ubiquitous streaming, a TiVo connected to your cable with a slingbox to watch it anywhere made you an absolute wizard
Living overseas as an American this was a lifesaver. We had one from 07 to 09 when we lived in Japan and it was the only way to watch English television. Thank my grandparents for having it hooked up for us!
Me too lived in misawa Japan and had one from 06-09
@@steelahlive misawa as well. Lived just across the street from Edgren.
I lived past the airport on the back gate road can’t remember the name. The houses I lived in have all been torn down from what I’ve been told. And googlemaps confirms.
@@steelahlive what squadron? My dad was shirt for intelligence I think I’ll have to ask
@@AsianManZan 35 Comm and had some intel friends up on the hill.
Ah, this takes me back! I used to work on an adult TV channel and we used to use a later model to send the program (camera input and graphic overlays) to the broadcaster.
Some of the production staff weren't very tech savvy and would unplug it to charge their phones, not realising they had just taken the whole station of the air.
😂 Care to share what channel that was 🤣
I used to work tech support for Sling Media, and the amount of tv stations using Slingboxes for monitoring or other tasks was astounding. Seeing dozens of units under their accounts was crazy
@@firewalker1372 It was a 'Babe' channel in the UK. Basically you have a girl on a bed with a phone and guys can call a premium number to have pleasant philosophical conversations with the young ladies.
@@andreysegura2510 Before we got the box we had an ancient analogue unit that you could transfer TGA sequences to for onscreen graphics to combine with the camera input.
It worked, but was hellish to update anything.
I guess the plugs they are familiar with have little to do with electronics, right?
I remember working at CompUSA when I was 18-19, being a cashier and only ringing like less than 5 of these up in the whole year I was there working lol. It was so confusing to sell and confusing for people to understand, that it just sat on the shelf lol. Only had 2 at any time, never locked up or shielded from theft just cause it sounded so damn confusing lmao.
When I graduated college I volunteered with a public access cable franchise, and we used a Sling box just like this one to cover events live by remote. We recorded to tape in the truck for reruns, but as an event was happening we used one of these suckers to get a feed back to the studio.
I'm pretty sure that this should continue functioning well past the server shutdown. This first version of the software didn't utilize their servers at all--the whole feature of logging in with your account and seeing all your devices was a later addition, the manual setup featured on the earlier versions should continue working indefinitely as far as I know.
I do not use anything I have to log in to use anywhere.
@@TheInsultInvestor How did you comment on UA-cam then? That does require a Google Account…
@@EliasSchmid00 interesting…
These (even this model) are plentiful in ISP Head Ends. When a lot of calls come in about digital break up or channel issues, engineers dial in remotely with these to see if the issue is at the Head end level or further up the line to coaxial amplifiers or other actives.
I wonder what they'll use after this point.
Wow, that's awesome. I keep hearing similar stories of this. It was probably a very cost effective solution for them to implement in order to monitor their network.
Who knew?!
HDHomeruns might be a viable replacement. Though networking is tougher because it's a local device only. (No sling servers to negotiate a connection with just a username in a website, etc)
@@mrklean93 i run a Jellyfin media server and use HDHomeRun in my setup
@@BillyAltDel Ditto!
I was an early adopter of the Slingbox well before Dish bought Sling. I kept it at my Parents house while I traveled for work. Awesome tech at the time. Thanks for sharing.
Great piece of tech! I loved my Slingboxes! I started with the first one and the last one I had (and actually still do somewhere) was a Slingbox Pro HD. I was traveling a lot 2000-2015 and these things were great for letting me watch my hometown sports teams while on the road. I also have to admit it was fun to sometimes mess with my Wife's viewing from a far by pausing playback or changing the channel on her :-P She had no idea what was going on :-) Good for a laugh!
Haha, oh man, that is cruel...
Thing is, weren't there were ALWAYS software options that could do this without actually requiring any 'slingbox' hardware? I always had a video server utility running as a service on my network, and was able to connect remotely from a hotel to watch video stored on my home PC just via 'port forwarding' etc.
I guess the 'slingboxes' were intended as a sort of 'plug and play' solution? Trouble is I remember hearing people having loads of issues using Sligboxes at hotels anyway due to network restrictions, and hotels are sort of the BIGGEST use case for the stupid things...
@@Quickened1 d
@@StreetPreacherr This is for streaming things that aren’t on your computer, like from an antenna (it had a tuner), or from cable and satellite boxes.
@@StreetPreacherr The Slingbox provides the TV tuner and the encoding hardware, which can encode FAR faster than your Windows XP era computer, as well as a way to control the set top box. Sling provides a Sling account sign-in service that will connect your Sling player to the Slingboxes associated to your Sling account. This means if the public IP address of your Slingbox ever changes (due to DHCP lease expiration or your ISP resetting the connection), that's not a problem because your Slingbox is always reporting back to the Sling server its current network configuration and the Sling server will take care of all the connection details for you when you log into a Sling player with your Sling account.
I think the older clients allow you to directly connect to the Slingbox IP and Port, and theoretically with port forwarding you can have it work over the internet. The servers just made it easier as you could just connect to the Slingbox ID without worrying about port forwards/changing public IP etc. I think the o.g. Slingbox and Slingbox Pro can do this, and Clint experienced this with them automatically working on an offline LAN. Later ones might be more iffy. So I think these should still be usable in some capacity after the server shutdown. I imagine the downloads for the clients will be yanked, so it's worth saving these down and putting them on the internet archive for future generations. I used Slingboxes extensively from around 2007 to around 2015. At one point SlingMedia forced ads into the horrible web client and I was more-or-less done with them by then. Shame to see the servers go down.
Good point, I remember that too with the original software.
Yeah I could see cable companies getting miffed with these devices.
I don't know about port forwarding and then there's the exposing any non-updated service to the Internet problem. A VPN (not the ones you see on ads the ones where you access your local Netwerk self hosted) would probably work way better assuming it can transit local traffic.
@@imark7777777 The Slingbox probably stores its software in ROM, so any attempt at exploiting the device to inject malware would be undone when the device restarts. No one is going to attack a Slingbox anyway.
@@iannicolson "No one is going to attack a Slingbox anyway" - challenge accepted, hold my cheetos...
8:00 - For anything in the XP era to work immediately on first try always feels like a miracle. It was truly great to catch Clint's disbelief and joy that it worked flawlessly.
XP was always my favourite because it always worked, 7 is second best and now I use the enterprise version of 10
When I started out working professionally in I.T . Windows XP SP1 was the big thing for most home users. It was great compared to older operating systems. The worst was really old software not being compatible when farmers would bring in their 15 year old computers and want their 30 year old accounting software installed on their new sparkling XP machine
I work at the NOC of an Internet/TV/VoIP provider and we used Slingboxes all the time back in the days to verify if live channels and VOD content were working properly in our different headends.
Better solutions exist these days but back then that's pretty much the best thing we had. It wasn't perfect but it was serviceable.
Latest models have better quality and were able to push higher bitrates and used better codecs 🙂
That's such a smart idea!
Something like this might still be useful for people who are stuck with a STB. For example, before switching to Verizon a few months ago, Spectrum DRM/cop-once protected every channel across 90%+ of the channel lineup.
As a result, I could only use Windows Media Center or the HDHR DVR app (when it finally became available... but never liked the IPG navigation). Once a show was recorded, the video file could not be played on another PC nor could it be re-encoded. Screen recorders usually didn't work (except for an older glitchy AMD display driver on my secondary desktop w/ Win 8.1), otherwise I would use an HDMI splitter to strip the HDCP then would re-input that HDMI signal into a video capture device. I could do this on the same machine w/ Windows Media center (essentially having a 2nd monitor that plugs into the HDMI input). It was pretty annoying..
With Verizon, my HDHomeRun has access to 95% of the channel line-up without DRM so I can record and then play recordings through Emby in any room and re-encode as needed. However, there are a few channels w/ DRM that might benefit from a device that can control the STB.
Yeah I worked for a company around 2011-2015 that provided bulk internet and TV services to a few dozen student housing apartment buildings around the country. I did purchasing for them, and I remember buying some discontinued models on eBay circa 2012 because the newer models didn't have the same features we needed? I don't remember the specifics.
I think we went to HDHomeRun products after that? Then we went big into the Dish Network Smartbox around 2015 that I guess had all of its own remote monitoring functions.
@@wemartin12 Ahh interesting. I could imagine a dish signal being very versatile wit this sort of thing.
Must work for frontier
i used to work for a TV station in the late 2000s. They used a slingbox as essentially an IP video link for like city halls or emergency operations centers and downtown cameras. they were still SD for a LONG time , so it worked perfectly fine.
The shape of the SlingBox always reminded me of that dedicated Ctrl+Alt+Del gimmick keyboard device from back in the day.
While I was searching for this genius device to remind me how it looks, I've accidentally stumbled upon the "Ctrl Alt Del Wand".
What can I say, LGR should blerb it.
It was an iron Ingot!
For the 2000s, this is ridiculously impressive! Video codecs have changed a lot since then to deal with motion better at lower bitrates.
The fact that you can watch a 1080p movie off of a single layer DVD in decent quality when encoded in H.264 (not to mention even newer ones like H265) is a testament to that. Imagine if video compression had leapfrogged optical media tech, DVD could totally have been a 720p standard.
The joys of service reliant devices.
Oh, but that's pretty neat that it looks like it'll still work on a local lan. Could be a fun toy for stuff at your home.
Or with a real VPN, not the "Privacy VPN" services. Real VPNs are systems that extend your office or home network to remote and mobile clients. Some used to be bundled with too many features to lock down clients of mobile workers, when all you wanted was an unrestricted connection for trusted professionals.
Yeah, or it's probably possible to use something like Hamachi to send that stuff over the internet too.
It wouldn't surprise me if some hackers make a third-party version of the service, where you just set a custom DNS and everything works as normal. I don't see why not... it's been done with the Wii for example.
@@johndododoe1411 "ReAl VpN"
Either way you're joining a virtual private network.
There is no such thing as a fake VPN.
Your inability to understand how two separate concepts share the same name, notwithstanding.
Back in college, me and this girl I knew would watch Maury before class on my cellphone at the time (it was a sliding windows phone LOLZ) it seemed like the most technological thing... we always tell this story to friends and end it by saying " The year was 2005." anyway, ended up marrying her six years later. Sling, good times.
Which phone? I was rocking some Samsungs around that time, loved that phone.
@@Komeuppance I had like a T-Mobile MDA or something. The screen would just slide up to reveal a small keyboard and it was touch screen as well. Ran Windows
My 5th grade teacher was a giant nerd, and had a Sling set up that he could watch on his first gen Motorola Droid. I remember being blown away that he could watch his home DVR stuff anywhere.
Wow…. Those were some cool days, I still remember when their app came up for iPhone 3G and I was happy as hell I was able to watch live tv on my phone. Thanks for sharing!
Here I am fiddling around with SAT>IP and TVHeadend when SlingBox was a thing for years?! This is insanely impressive, absolutely love this!
I had a couple, initially at home, then relocated to the Datacentre I worked for. Used to be groups on Facebook (and I think Craigslist) dedicated to sharing Slingboxes. Had access to a couple of boxes in the USA and one in Australia.
Great fun!
These were so cool. My dad had agreements with some of his friends to use these to catch out of market football games back in the day. I have the modern equivalent, Plex Pass with an ATSC 3.0 tuner, in my media center setup and it's great.
Is this doable wirh Jellyfin?
@@HeroRareheart yeah, if you have an HDHomeRun or similar
That's not a true modern equivalent if it has a monthly fee though. That is a modern way to come close to the experience, but you pay a monthly fee for the convenience instead of a onetime fee for hardware like a Slingbox. Doing it your way is significantly more expensive than something like a Slingbox.
@@awesomeferret that's not true, you can pay a one-time fee for a perpetual license for Plex Pass, which is the only reason I even considered it. If you're that worried about it, there are FOSS alternatives.
@@TadanoHitohito I'm happy to be wrong about that. How did I miss that one? Dang.
Oh shit I bought one of these! Being able to watch cable on the go was freaking mind-blowing to me at the time. I realize this was my first streaming experience too.
Fun fact, a friend of mine had this set up in his room at his parents house when he studied abroad. It was cool as hell!
Like 10 years ago I worked in the NOC of a cable company. We had dozens of Slingboxes in our hubs so we could look at the video on site if a problem was reported with a particular channel.
If they still have them, they are going to have a bad time next weekend.
work as tech support for an ISP that still does the same thing, not going to have a fun time soon with reported channel outages.
edit: looks like it's already not working, just tried to log in after posting this comment, hopefully there's another way to confirm them for us
@@johndododoe1411 not if you do some research on gh
When it was first released, I connected it to my TiVo and I used it while on military deployments. The two combined helped me from missing all the content I wanted to see. Before streaming apps, if you missed a show, you'd have to buy the DVD set after it was released, unless someone taped them for you. This was an excellent set up and worked flawlessly.
I think I had it running on my Compaq iPaq with a compact flash style wifi card in the sleeve, but I don't exactly remember. Lots of emerging tech back then before the advent of the smart phone.
Now, I have PiVPN and Plex running on a Pi4 which does so much more for a fraction of SWaP and cost and I stream it on global travels to my smartphone; crazy the journey we've taken.
Nice video walking down memory lane.
Haha - i still have that very box to this day. Haven't used it for around 15 years (give or take) but it was great to watch shows you had on your cable co's DVR or, i believe, Live TV as well. Moved on to more sophisticated IPTV boxes since i 'cut the cord' last December for good!
my first job out of uni was working for echostar europe (merged with dish which bought sling media) as a software engineer and one of the final projects I worked on was the Freesat HDS-600RS which was a satellite tuner-DVR with integrated slingbox. Was really handy as it removed a the need for all the cables. I moved to pay TV and so the receiver was changed so that was tucked away but still kept hold of the slingbox pro and continued to get regular use until it died and I got a slingbox m1. They all got plenty of love, not just from me, but also my brother when he wanted to watch something on a channel he couldn't get. Now I'll end up creating something similar using a HDMI encoder and IR blaster (maybe with a Pi) and decide on how to connect to it externally.
You might want to consider trying 'Tvheadend', though that only supports digital TV tuners, not A/V inputs.
Awesome to see you hooked it up to a Laserdisc player! And then even choosing such a classic movie. Excellent blerb!
Wow. 17 years went by just like that. I remember hearing people on the radio talk about it way back when.
I recall my very tech savvy uncle in 2006 recommending that I get a Slingbox to keep up with my favorite sports. He raved about his SB and I can see why. My uncle passed away in 2014 at young age of 50 years old. RIP uncle Pete and Slingbox.
My memory of the SlingBox was using it to watch House MD while riding Amtrak's Coast Starlight north thru the Bay Area.
Sprint's 3G EVDO network was uncongested enough back then to allow streaming without much buffering.
My ex’s dad lived in Brazil in 2012 and used one of these to watch tv from the US. Anytime we turned the channel on her living room tv we’d get a call from Brazil telling us to turn it back.
Haha, that is funny!
Do you miss her?
@@jinxterx lmao no man, that was ten years ago
@@Aenima308 oh okay :D
That's what the ir blaster is for, so you can remotely control the cable box in the livingroom over the internet.
I just sent my old Slingbox to Goodwill. It was great when I needed it but now have no use for it. I got a 4 tuner HD Homerun that is tied into my Plex server so that takes care of most of my old Slingbox needs... RIP champ, you fought well.
Never heard of Slingbox before watching this video but they were ahead of its time, the mid-late 2000s versions of Silicondust's Homerun tuners.
At the old cable company I was an engineer at, we put these in all our headends so our centralized noc could watch channels to get real world end user experience to troubleshoot things. Worked very well tbh...
That's a really impressive Blerb. It could honestly almost pass for a main channel video. Great work!
I thought I was at the main channel lol
I used to work in a Currys/PC World store when these came out. I remember having a pile of them in store but it seemed to me that very few people were ever interested in them and I never actually saw one being sold. Honestly I always assumed that this was one of those things that just dissapeared into the ether and ended up failing when services like Netflix and UA-cam started taking off.
I think I bought mine from PC World and a very reduced price
It was a pretty niche device, I can see myself using one when I first moved to the US and wanted to watch British TV still, of course now I just need a VPN and streaming account.
I think the tech really only saw wide spread use when dish network bought them and integrated it into their DVRs. Now just the name will live on as dish’s streaming service.
I remember buying one from Currys/PC World very cheaply on sale when they were in desperate need of wanting rid of them, I don't think I ever took it out of the box and it might even still be lurking in my house somewhere!
It didn't actually "disappear into the ether" though. Take something like WebOS (the mobile OS, not the spiritual successor for TVs). An entire mobile platform came and went without the average person ever knowing it existed, but the Sling servers are only now being shut down. That's not a huge failure in the grand scheme of things at all. Heck, you could add Windows Phone as an example, although most people do know that existed if you remind them.
This is a wonderful video, fully exploring digital stuff from years ago.
Overall that box would have been astounding a decade + ago.
This sort of journalism is compelling, you are adding to the understanding of the history of ‘computers’.
Ooh that takes me back! I had one of these original ones and loved it - could even stream to my Palm Pilot! Main issue was how slow Internet connections were in those days but I absolutely loved it. Did some beta testing a few years later for their integrated DVR systems.
2008-2012 was when I worked for the cable company. Had all the channels everywhere. I didn't have this preticular model but the sling box was amazeballs! It worked perfectly fine with game consoles btw. some of my first game capture was done with an xbox 360, a sling box, and snagit running on a windows vista pc.
Cool. That whole don't use with video games spiel was probably a licensing thing...
I'm think the "don't use with game consoles" thing was meant for you to not actually play the game over the stream, because of the crazy latency (6-8 seconds as he mentioned). If you even had a way to do so (maybe with a wireless controller on a LAN network).
@@hanselmanryanjames oh yes of course the lag would destroy gameplay, but for capture or playback it worked just fine.
I love your videos and would appreciate any more channels like yours you recommend!
I remember seeing those a lot in Walmart, and RadioShack they sure were futuristic and cool.
Had that exact model bought in 2006 and used it on and off during a time when I was all over the place (US, UK and Brazil) and it did work surprisingly well considering how primitive this type of technology still was back then (and how low bandwidth even “broadband internet” was at the time). But it sure felt like “the future” back then!
Last year, when visiting my parents, I found it in my pile of old junk and finally put it for recycling after having it sitting in a box unused for so long. Never in a million years I thought it would still have online/server support after 15 years (especially considering how many other online services of that time, such as game DRM servers for example, have been long gone)… So I’m not exactly surprised to find out they finally killed it.
i loved your excitement when the preview came up during the installer, absolutely wonderful!
I had this, upgraded my dad’s internet at home, got him another cable box and set it up at home on a dinner tray next to his internet. I then slang the Super Bowl and many other great moments of television between 2006-2009 while stationed in Japan!! I loved it!! And it worked pretty flawlessly after setup!
I'm glad you mentioned the PDA software, it was wild back in those days. There was a version that you had to pay monthly for, it was around 2008-ish from what I remember and I know it was for the Palms and PPCs. Well you could get a cracked version of the application and it worked for free, Lol. There was another one that streamed regular TV I think and it was the same kind of deal.
The mobile software was available as a one time purchase of 29 bux or so. There was never a monthly fee, at least when it came to Slingbox. When it changed to echostar and they may have changed that with the other devices, but Slingboxes never required a subscription.
Mobile apps with monthly fees is a bad enough idea in 2022, I wonder what was going through their heads thinking people would be financially stupid enough to pay a monthly fee for an app like that in 2008.
@@awesomeferret There was no monthly fee for the app nor for their service. It was a selling point actually. By the time it released (2010-2011) we weren't even informed of it and we had to figure out how to help callers get the app and provide support for it. It was available for $29, could have been $29.99, can't recall. But it was a one time thing, no monthly fee for the app nor the 'service', that being the ID/accounr that would allow the player to connect to the box through their servers.
@@andreysegura2510 well, keep in mind that you're literally replying to a comment where someone is reminiscing about that of which you say does not exist.
@@awesomeferret and keep in mind that I used to work for SlingMedia back then, and one of the selling points of the Slingbox was not having to pay a monthly fee. And the app was available as a one time purchase, no monthly subscription required. I know that for a fact, as it was a huge deal back then. For 4-5 years users had been using the SlingPlayer on the computer at no cost, and they suddenly had to pay for an app on iOS or Android. There were even apps available for blackberry and windows mobile.
I have one of the later models; this was a great device for the late 'aughts' for international travel and being able to watch TV from home. I had the RF setup with my DVR, and could watch recorded material from anyone that had a half decent Internet connection. The lag on the control side sucked, so you didn't want to "channel surf" with one of these, but they had perfectly watchable AV on my iPad 2 way back when and was a nice reminder of home at a time when more and more broadcasters were putting geolocks on their online streaming options (not much different from today). Mind you I cut the cord several years back to go 100% streaming only, at which point the SlingBox stopped making sense, and it's been sitting in a box in my basement for the last 3+ years.
I had a version that supported component video. it didn't have an internal tuner. on occasion when sling servers were down, I was able to force whatever version of the software i had to connect to my ip directly as long as i had the port open and routed in my fire wall. These were great when a family member was in and out of hospital for a while. the hospital had free wifi that was pretty good. so, a laptop at the bed and they could watch the cable box that was at home.
Nostalgia hit.
I still have mine in my store room.
I used to use it while I’m at work on-site in between jobs.
The Blurb machine is running on all cylinders, Excellent!
What is the blurb machine
@@MrGamerAl @lgr IS the blurb machine.....
Holy crap I remember this. I remember when I first got it I was so excited to be able to watch TV from my PDA. I got it all late of course (it became cheap when all the streaming stuff started coming up), but when I got it I was excited because my job sucked and this was the only thing that kept me same during work.
Unreal how easy this worked, feels like we took a step backwards in that department until recently. Nice video Clint. And happy new year
Man this is so cool. I can't believe something from back then still works and still works as intended! That's AWESOME!
I've never heard of this, but it seems like a really cool idea; I would have definitely wanted one. Of course, these days, most things are available on the internet anyway: most TV stations offer streaming of their channels and of course the glut of streaming services.
I have one of these units and use it to listen to my police scanner on Audio only mode when im not home. It can also do DTV from over the air but my antenna is getting old and loosing channels so I just primarily used it for the police scanner. I had at one time tied the video out on my camera DVR system to it so I can see all my cameras on my phone but the image is so bad you can barely tell what was going on. I really liked watching broadcast and the scanner when im not home but now it's supposed to end on Wednesday which is a mega bummer to me. I have yet to find something that is a direct replacement due to the fact I cannot connect to my home network on the outside world, it has to use a server to bounce the stream from. I had it setup to my father's DirecTV in a separate bedroom because he had 2 tv setup. I could control it using the IR blaster and have it send the wakeup select button to receiver and control it for a few months before he moved down to my sister's place and had it shut off.
I love how all the words spelled out on the top not only look good, but are functional to the design. They give it venting to keep it from getting too hot.
So I purchased this product back in early 2006 from a vendor in Hong Kong. I used it for several years to sling the local TV (mostly news programs) from my HK home to me when I was abroad. I remember that there was a Win CE 5.0 client that I ran on my ASUS MyPal that worked really well. Thanks LGR for reminding me of those times!
I remember installing 1 of these for the office manager when I worked for DirecTV (DirectTech NE/Multiband). Then when I worked for Dish Network, they had bought Sling and integrated it into their system (Sling adapter or built into the Hopper w/Sling and up). Good times
>working at dish network
>Good times
I didn't know being forced to sell sound bars and surge protectors was considered good times.
@@crappyatlife pre SHS was actually really good. The worst thing was IP and making sure CXs understood to give you all 9s on the survey
@@alericthanus my csat was on point 💪. I liked the work but hated the company. Charlie ergen can suck a bag of dicks
At this point in Slingbox's development, it was not how well the elephant danced that amazed, but that the elephant could dance at all, if you catch my drift. To the eyes of 2005 this must have seemed like some sort of voodoo or something, inspiring cargo cults and all the rest.
Seriously, very cool to see this work, and very cool that it works so well. I think this does show the importance of creating a product that works out of the box with little fuss, first time.
I was there, complete with my Windows Mobile 5 phone, in early 2006, when I got a SlingBox (I worked for Microsoft at the time, so I had WinCE devices just laying around). I can't say I thought it was voodoo, but I did think it was pretty neat - my primary use case was when I was traveling, being able to watch all my premium cable content, cable provided on-demand content, etc., versus the very limited options in a typical hotel room. I found the streaming worked "well enough" even across transatlantic links. I'd often setup a wifi hotspot using Windows ICS (as Wifi in hotels was still hit-or-miss at that point) from the ethernet drop in a hotel room, and then connect my Windows Mobile device to that impromptu AP.
Anyway, for a good 4 years or so, I got a ton of use out of my SlingBox and later HD variant. I think I kept a SlingBox hooked to my entertainment center well into 2012. Over time, it simply fell into disuse, and eventually I removed it during an equipment upgrade. I still have both SlingBox examples sitting in a Rubbermaid container somewhere.
I used Slingbox back in college, because I was out of state and wanted to watch local news and channels that weren’t available at my university. My college professor told me about the slingbox because he watches college sports from other states. I watched FSN Southwest and G4, back when that channel was relevant!
I remember selling these when I worked at Circuit City back in like 2005-06.
I really hope someone sets up private hosted servers to keep these things running, because this is a cool idea
We have better systems nowadays that do not need a special box or anything, while I'm not sure all of the methods there is stuff like Jellyfin that can perform similar functions. You just need a pc capable of streaming.
@@Logan-zp8bi Yeah, and we also have new more powerful game consoles and newer more powerful social platforms etc etc. That's not the point. The point is preservation of technologies past, present, and future
@@RubyRoks like how Polaroid is doing the old films so that they can still play around with the old bois (not that old tho, thats too old)
So basically a Polaroid thing but slingbox and private servers
@@RubyRoks It can be preserved but private servers come with their own problems. I remember someone mentioned someone was using it for adult services. Though if you mean privately owned servers not a bad idea.
@@Logan-zp8bi I do mean privately owned and hosted servers. Specifically i'm reminded of the people who saw GameSpy was going down and made their own GameSpy compliant servers to keep games like Star Wars Battlefront II (2005) online
I had the OG SlingBox since 2008... Very long time user and big enthusiast of this technology which was super innovative back then especially with the bandwith adaptation... Too bad they didn't really opened their tech.
I got a Sling Box Solo at a thrift store today! Complete in box-except for the software CD! Fortunately, the Internet Archive has both the 2005 manual and the 2005 software CD. I will have to try this out!
I set one of these up for a friend of mine who traveled all the time and she wanted to watch her soap operas that she had recorded on her TIVO. Used to work fine.
Slingbox was cool. you could tell it where you were and it would produce a tv guide that was actually accurate .. less trouble than finding a streaming program today.
It's 2022, and cox cable still won't allow full mobile access to all shows or dvr .... Pathetic.
So many blerbs lately, its blerbtastic!
God, I remember these on the shelf in PC World. My uncle in Germany was trying to convince my dad to buy one so he could watch, IIRC, football games that were being broadcast in England. My dad said "no" pretty much immediately.
I had a slightly newer version of the Slingbox back when Netflix would still send you DVDs in the mail. If a DVD arrived while I was traveling for work I would ask my roommate to throw the disc in so that I could watch remotely. This was also great for sporting events back when you couldn’t watch live TV on the internet. As noted in the video, the upload speeds were never all that great so one would inevitably have to deal with a lot of lag, but still good when desperate. Was sad when Slingbox stopped supporting a lot of the older devices and when I read they were turning off their servers. Still, a great piece of tech that served its purpose until it was no longer needed.
A passthrough device that can stream to internet devices should exist still. I still have the og slingbox. Too bad it'll brick in 2 days. It was really handy, and very underrated. My parents had Direct TV with TiVo and it worked great for the family to watching stuff many states away, even with the horrible internet we had in rural USA.
check - it's not over yet with these boxes
Makes you wonder why this had to connect to their servers at all when everything was done by your Internet connection, planned obsolescence perhaps? also the fact that Dish bought Sling always made me think that they bought it to kill it because it obviously hurts the revenue of Cable TV operators and was used a lot for pirate IPTV streams.
Well it kind of has to be done via there servers for anything outside of your local network (your home's network)
Otherwise you'd need to fiddle with port forwarding and ip addresses from your network so you can connect directly to the box, which would probably be a bit much to expect an end user to do
instead the sling box uploading to their servers and your receiving device downloading from them ends up much easier, being a server already named in the DNSes and ready for receiving connections
pretty much required for being able to watch your sling box from around the world !
Today I learned, Sling is an older company than I would've initially assumed. Legitimately didn't know they had a presence before their current streaming cable alternative.
I love LGR!!! Clint you rock homie. Thank you for doing what you do. Merry Christmas brother
I noticed in the options there, there was a direct connection option where you specify the IP and port of the slingbox. I wonder if you forward the port in your router/modem to the device this will allow you to continue to use it in the future? Unless there's still some extra DRM type thing happening in the background
I remember my father used to have a Slingbox Pro HD both at his house andlater at my mother's house when they downsized the number of houses they owned in the early to mid 2010's. No HDMI ports on the Pro HD, but it definitely worked when we wanted to watch some hockey games on Comcast Sports Network either outside or at another house and the picture quality was fine, good enough. Thanks for making a video less than a week before the Sling servers get sunset.
Wow, we've been eating good on the blerbs channel lately. Thanks, Clint!
This is really cool. I'd never used one of these. Kinda wish I had. Shame it's finally dying. Perhaps some day someone will reverse engineer the servers and people could set up their own for these.
I'm really tempted to get one just so I can run it over LAN to my old Palm Pilot.
they have and it works :) --- google is your friend
@@sp2222222 Really? I didn't expect them to do that, so I didn't look. Most companies just turn everything off and walk away. That's really cool.
Ooh wow this gave me a wave of memories I hadn't thought of in a long while !
My dad worked at RIM in 2005, and received one of these sling box things at a conference or something similar, it was this model shown in the video, with all the text on the top and weird shape
I remember it sitting under the television for years without it being ever used, and the two infra red things duct taped to the top of the television for long after even the sling box was removed from the TV stand
The only time I ever remember using it was when me and my dad were sitting in the car outside our house, looking in through the living room window at the TV, and my dad connecting to the TV with his blackberry, and changing the channel to mess with my mother (who was watching the television in the house at the time, unaware we were outside using the sling thing)
Other than that I don't think we ever really used it!
I have more memories of finding it in the loft and being drawn to the unusual shape with the text on top haha
I always assumed when seeing it up there that the software it needed had long since shut down and the company had been forgotten, I had no idea it (was) still usable or that they had made more models of sling box after, very cool to find out !
If I remember right, I don't think it had a SCART port on the back, which may've been why it never saw much use, due to difficulty having it connected to a video source, since everything (other than the RF antenna going to the DVR) would've been using SCART
I do definitively remember my dad teaching me about how the IR blaster thing worked though, and thinking that was really clever so you could use the remote through it
Never realised the two black IR things we had taped on top of the TV were to do with the sling box though !
Hey, I still have my Asus Lamborghini Murcielago VX6s. You can laugh but I lived off of that surprisingly powerful netbook with a dedicated graphics card, fast wifi, an amazing screen and good battery life for years, and I picked it up brand new for the price of a Chromebook. Eventually the heat of multiple Australian summers fried it, but it does still work just very, very slowly.
Oh slingboxs … used mine years ago and using the prog out on my old Panasonics + IR = all inputs and controls wherever. So crazy all those years ago.
As far as I remember different generations of slingboxes had different codecs and formats, that create issues with the versions of the player. They start with H264 baseline profile over ASF to end with H264 high profile and HLS (even with a little DVR for instant replay)
My dad is a TV installer by trade, I distinctly remember going on a job with him when I was 7-8 years old, where the customer also wanted to see if we could set up this Sling box they had picked up while they were in America.
No problems with set-up, and it had the IR codes for their Sky box I'm pretty sure, but I think the WiFi on the ISP-supplied routers at the time just wasn't up to the task, especially considering Irish homes usually have thick walls; even for local streaming you'd want ethernet all the way. I can't imagine it working well on remote connections either, everyone had awful speeds back then. I remember everyone those days having these awful Netopia routers, we were cool because we had replaced ours with a Linksys.
Thank you for this man. My mom got one of these when I was younger and we never got a chance to hook it up. She's passed away now and she would.l of loved this video God bless u man. This rly made my night ❤️
I seem to recall a period where I didn't have my sling desktop software attached to a sling account. I just manually punched in my hostname to the config and fed it my sling password. The setup software also didn't require a sling account to get setup. This wasn't the case on later models which did in fact require use of their servers. Things started going downhill when they decided to just get in to directly livestreaming TV as a provider. But 8 or 9 years ago before it got *really* bad; there were "shady" places offering slingbox hosting/rentals and forums were people literally exchanged access to each other's hardware. Fun stuff though. I had access to some random SkyUK box for so many months that I watched more than my actual slingbox.
It would be nice if they put out one last software update allowing you to connect directly from a client to a server Slingbox. Just plug in IP or domain.
Then wouldn't they just be essentially 'routers'?
So is that actually how the slingboxes ALWAYS worked? You'd send your 'home video' to the 'slingbox servers', then THEY would transmit the signal to the slingbox device at your hotel or wherever?
I just figured they were all 'peer to peer', I didn't even realize that Slingbox ran servers!
@@StreetPreacherr No their servers handle(d) the login and forwarding to the server IP. Then you'd directly connect to the server for the stream.
This should be mandatory for companies shutting down services that physical hardware depends upon.
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe older models that use early versions of the software should still be usable after the servers shut down. On early versions of the Sling Player software, there was an option to set up a direct connection to your slingbox. All you need is dynamic DNS, and to open the correct port on your router, I want to say it was 5000, but can't remember for sure now, and I'm betting it will work fine, totally circumventing their servers.
yeah I was gonna say, I have (had? It's probably still around here somewhere) one of the old non-HD red/black ones and I feel like I remember digging up the ancient slingplayer for windows and connecting directly to it back in like 2012
Oh wow!! I remember my Sling HD model. I streamed my DirectTv on it. !! The whole crew would be gathered around my laptop during the Super Bowl…Good times!