Not sure that dish would work for the current OP. OTA requires a tuner. There are some OTA that might stream, but not many.

Dish makes a USB OTA tuner that plugs into the Hopper line of receivers

Didn't know that. I cut the cord 5 years ago and my American friends haven't asked for help in a long time. Good to know.

Well, we have two years to figure it out, but talking with some of the sling developers in the past couple days I think there is going to be a third service possibility, for retired slingboxes or they were suggesting someone could create a real time record and stream capability to essentially capture and forward what might be coming from an input without having to hijack the output like sling does. I�m sure there will be some creative solutions in the comping 12 months. I�m keeping my ear to the ground since I have three devices around the globe that allow access to various country programming, and of course continue to use slingboxes - albeit infrequently, to shift content around the LAN or to watch content from various devices in parallel but in various LAN locations or even WAN locations. Historically, I used the audio only stream to get access to simple cable programming in an organized way but it was years ago that sling deprecated the audio only stream (it�s still there but it uses the same bandwidth as the SQ stream which is just silly) but with things like Sirius streaming, comcast, directv, etc one can get pretty much any real time content somewhat easily as an audio stream-other than regional restrictions.

Thanks for posting this; I've yet to receive any official notification for my account. I loved the service when travelling overseas but admittedly haven't used it much as other streaming options became more prevalent.

For many of my assignments abroad, Slingbox was my way to get my TV fix from home and avoid CNN International. But with so much of the home TV programming now streaming, the Slingbox got replaced in purpose by use of customized VPNs to facilitate the streaming without the Slingboxes in use.

I am curious on how some people are repurposing or stripping their Slingboxes instead of just trashing the entire devices.

I can't say I'm all that sad to see Slingbox die. My box's functionality had been degrading for years, to the point where a while back it became impossible to do anything but stream whatever happened to be playing on the cable box back home (i.e. it didn't respond to any commands sent via Slingbox), in a laggy, low-quality fashion. I disconnected it a while back and have it sitting in a box of junk to go to the electronics recycling facility next time I get around to it.

Too bad, because for a while, it was great. Before streaming services (including Plex - I have four friends who maintain great servers) became prevalent, it was a very good way to watch shows off my DVR at home, but more importantly, was a way for me to watch whatever sports I had access to back home, even when I wasn't there. Hard to get coverage of local NHL games when in the US, or watch the English Premier League in Colombia, for example. Unfortunately, as great as Netflix, Plex, etc are, none of them really do the job for live sports, as far as I know.

Is there anything actually worthwhile in there? As I said above, I was just going to get rid of it.

Don't know yet. I've not had time to tear it apart and am not sure if that's a good idea yet as maybe someone will come up with some way to meddle with the thing without making the old things all junk.

Slingbox says they are cutting their server access to it for any and all remaining workable devices in November 2022.

I guess I should long ago have kept in mind this: the possibility that a device being online and enabled for pushed firmware upgrades with day to day service operations being subject to reliance upon OEM's own servers would come with the risk of this kind of equipment obsolescence.

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.

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.

Was that really the plan? Seems to go against their whole value-added proposition of making it easy for consumers to use.

To be honest, I had no idea the company was ever sold. I bought my first Slingbox well after that and can't remember ever seeing any mention of Dish/EchoStar.

;-)... I have some slingboxes from 2004 still running..!

Really? Have you had to do anything special to keep them going?

no, they haven't received many updates at all in a while, some for years.. it's mostly the mobile client apps that tend to break down around major mobile OS updates (ios version and android versions) and nobody is doing much if anything to update those. The boxes themselves have certainly lost some capability around guide data, proper remotes icons and even some remote functions for working with cable boxes and DVR's and the like, but overall regular functions continue to work. For outside the LAN i've been using things like directv now (now ATT TV) and comcasts mobile apps for recording and watching outside the LAN. Only downside is regional and international restrictions, so international viewing with those types of apps is much more cumbersome and challenging having to often do DOUBLE VPN's back to the LAN in order to be able to stream local domestic content. At that point, throughput and quality really start to fall off.