Originally Posted by
Adam Smith
The other thing that always worried me about them was their reliance on sales of new boxes to fund continuing operations. As annoying as subscriptions can be, at least they provide ongoing revenue that allows companies to keep going. With Slingbox charging no ongoing fees, as soon as device sales slowed down, it had the potential to become problematic for them, and bad for those of us who needed them to stick around and keep operating the servers for us.
That indeed became a concern too, but the alternative would have been if Slingbox had done what it intended to do at the start: provide hardware to customers who would then not have to rely upon the company-provided servers for the hardware to work. At least if they had stuck to their original intention, the customers of the boxes would not have to count on Slingbox staying solvent in order for the devices to work.