There’s a second-screen iPad app that allows you to watch any TV network, any time, anywhere in the world with a wifi or 3G connection. Unbeknownst to many social TV enthusiasts, this iPad app has been available for almost a year and the computer app and technology since 2005. While it also requires a $140 box, an MSO subscription and a download fee of $29.99, it’s definitely the most impressive “TV Everywhere” and second screen product on the market.
Since the first Slingbox launched in 2005, the company now boasts a product line that “is distributed direct to consumers in over 5,000 retail stores in 20 countries, and to several television service providers in North America, Europe and Asia.” The majority of the reviews for the cheaper Slingbox SOLO are on Amazon are five-stars and a quick search for Slingbox on Twitter reveals customers not only happy with their “TV Everywhere” product, but talking about the specific content they’re watching. Even local TV stations have used Slingbox for remote reporting locations as a cheaper and effective option.
While the conversations are present on Twitter, reviews and more it seems that Sling Media has done close to nothing to acknowledge, leverage, or add value to the conversations and community of TV Everywhere they’ve been building for over five years. There are no share buttons within the iPad, iPhone, Android or web apps. The @MisterSling handle on Twitter has fewer followers than the number of retail stores they’re in, and it’s often confused for @slingmedia and @slingbox.
The potential goes beyond marketing themselves better through social media. With HBO, Turner and Comcast’s Xfinity all offering TV Everywhere content, Slingbox trumps them by offering the most content out all three combined, simply because they offer everything that’s available through your MSO subscription. At the least, Slingbox can easily become a powerful social TV network by offering a few share buttons in the right place. On a deeper level they should integrate Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare connects to find out what, when and where your friends and followers are slinging.
Sling Media’s executive team doesn’t even seem to have any personal presence on social media and the company is filled with corporate confusion. They were acquired by Echostar in 2007. At the time Echostar owned Dish Network (the MSO with third most subscribers as of June 2011) which it spun off right after. The split allowed Sling Media to stay operator agnostic remaining a part of the new technology-focused Echostar corporation (a whopping 698 followers on Twitter). Sadly, it seems as the new Echostar has only managed a partnership with freesat, an MSO in the UK that was started by BBC and ITV to provide “free digital TV, plus free HD programmes, with no contract and no subscription, just a one-off payment. No catch.” The partnership leverages the company’s SlingLoaded technology, allowing a provider to license and insert the company’s technology into their own boxes.
So why haven’t more MSOs leveraged SlingLoaded? Actively enabling content on a second screen is causing the MSOs trouble (for example, Viacom sued Time Warner Cable when they launched a “timeshifting” app this summer). While TWC hasn’t used SlingLoaded in their boxes they did announce a rebate promotion for Slingbox whose hidden agenda was for “essentially reminding programmers that there are other ways to port channels to different screens and places, though it wouldn’t admit to such a tactic on the record,” according to The New York Times.
The consumer continues to lose and stay confused as to which content providers provide TV Everywhere streaming and which don’t. Sling Media might be able to help us “occupy” the MSOs and content providers by simply providing users with the social tools to tell the MSOs, the content providers, our friends and followers that close-to-perfect, cloud-based, actual TV Everywhere technology has been around for years and has been used by TV junkies that still subscribe to content provider-filled MSOs.