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Thursday, July 13, 2006

Applian vs SlingMedia

I have been supporting SlingBox since the price went down enough for me to buy one. I have been enjoining it and to me it's a wonderful gadget. But today I got the email from Applian letting me know that the program that I bought from them to record shows from SlingPlayer was not going to work anymore if I update the ROM of my SlingBox with the latest version. For unknown reasons, SlingMedia has started to encrypt the stream and the At-Large Recorder can't decrypt the stream to record it. At the beginning of this week I got another message from Applian letting me know that they changed the name of the program after a long dispute with SlingMedia about this point, something that today has been made public in a post at Applian Blog.

From the beginning I never liked the fact that SlingMedia charged a lot of money for their hardware and on top of that charged users for the players for Pocket PC and SmartPhone separately. Seemed to me abusive to charge for Hardware and Software. Today I think that I'm in the presence of a new SlingMedia manoeuvre to liquidate the competition for a future recorder made by them. I hope that I'm wrong because this is a very dirty move. A move that does not say anything good about the administration of this company and its owner. A money is not all in this life and competition is always good, it helps giving you a reason to fight back making a better product.

SlingMedia you are about to lose all my support.

3 comments:

  1. I wonder if Sling is largely trying to protect themselves from the MPAA, the various studios/TV networks, and other copyright owners.

    In the current environment, they may already be on somewhat shakey ground since their product is essentially re-transmitting television broadcasts. As long as they keep it pretty squarely in the category of streaming the broadcast to another device for personal use, they can likely make a pretty good case for falling inside Fair Use.

    I can easily see them being pretty nervous about the idea of people being able to record their streams, though. I'm not too surprised that this isn't something they would want to encourage.

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  2. Jeff did you read applian blog?
    does slingmedia owns the word Sling? I did not like that part either.

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  3. Yeah, that trademark stuff was all kind of weird. At the same time, I could even see that as a case of them trying to discourage the product without directly stating the real reason...

    For what its worth, I don't actually agree with the hard line that Sling seems to be taking. I just can understand why this product could easily be something that would worry them in the current environment.

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