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.
I would have thought that the purchase by Echostar / Dish would have helped with any of the operating unit cashflow concerns. Integrating the slingbox technology into the DISH hopper devices (and some of the SLING technology for distributed network based DVR and streaming) would have helped keep the need for cash as direct slingbox hardware sales fell off at bay.