Let’s hope Charles is too busy at Dish to “whack” the Slingbox, using piano wire, no doubt. I suppose that price might be acceptable for Sling per account if it meant keeping Slingbox alive for us all because Cheap Charlie just might be willing to give Slingbox the Roman “thumbs down” if he don’t like the Slinbox Excel spreadsheets. Well, LastPass charges $1.00 per month annually. The problem is so many of the ads do not relate to any product or service I would care to purchase. I would be willing to tolerate ads on my Siling, but if they were implemented like on TiVo or Roku: highly visable, bit easy to ignore if I don’t want the product, on thoe rare occasions I have selected the ad. I shall avoid updating my browser plugin. They’re being screwed right up against the wall, and they damn well know it. Slingplayers were never really mass-market devices, they were cool gadgets purchased largely by technophiles. These people paid hundreds of dollars for a product that didn’t show ads. If it uses native client, much more complex.Īll of that really doesn’t address the point, though. If the web slingplayer is HTML5, ads can certainly be blocked with something like ublock or adblock+. Only questions are the amount of obfuscation in front of them and the amount of effort technically adept people will contribute to block the ads. But Roku ads really aren’t bad just on the main screen, never overlaying or certainly interrupting content, so I could deal.Īds on an actual computer can always be blocked, because you have superuser privileges. I blocked ads on my roku for awhile at the router, but then they wised up and started using the same external hosts for all content, and blocking that host essentially turned my roku into a paperweight. All I can say is, good thing I bought a TiVo Roamio just yesterday, with integrated streaming, as Slingbox is significantly less compelling this week. Indeed, I suspect ad-serving existing customers is a last-ditch effort to justify continuing this Echostar initiative. Look, given the sudden glut of compelling TV everywhere solutions and (Sling TV) branding confusion combined with the Slingbox hardware expense and required technical know-how, I assume sales are poor. Further, they’d like to direct folks to this Multichannel article which covers their web and desktop player ad-serving position.) ( Update: Sling Media PR informs me that the Slingbox 500 overlay will not be used for third party ads and paid mobile apps will not receive ads.
And not only do they drop the ad unit on top of your video, their implementation is flawed in that both sound and video are briefly interrupted as it clears. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with the mobile apps – at some point will they too receive ads and, if so, would that result in dropping the $15 iPhone and Android fee? Initially, Sling is promoting new features.
Going full screen or shrinking the window does reduce the chrome and ads However, it’s still a startling spammy intrusion. If that wasn’t disappointing enough, Sling has seriously overstepped when it comes to their Slingbox 500 owners who shelled out $300 for the benefit of video pass-thru and television output now sullied by banner advertisement overlays. Ha, just kidding, it’s all bad news… as those who accepted the prompt to download the latest desktop Slingplayer client in time for March Madness are now treated to an interface overrun with ads, as shown above. Well, as a follow-on, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.