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Networking - Tuesday, September 25, 2007

$380M Buys Sling Media

Sling Media is a divisive startup. Users tend to be ecstatic but there are not many of them. Most of the Slingbox fans that we know of happen to be baseball, just like its founders, brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian who pounced on the idea as fans of the Francisco Giants fans. They developed the concept of the Slingbox during the 2002 Major League Baseball season when they missed some games.

Slingbox connects to you cable or sat signal, and streams the video to a computer and from them can send the video on to your cell phone or any other net connected display. Today we learn that Echostar has bought SlingMedia fo $380M by Echostar, one of the investors in Sling Media. It does seem like a good deal for both companies. Echostar has figured out how to get hardware into mainstream TV rooms and Slingbox technology will give them a means to differentiate from cable companies.

Read - Gigaom