Goodbye, Slingbox. You deserved better than what's coming.
Three boxes. Twenty years. And a warning about the future of free television. Today I threw away three Slingboxes. I lined them up on a 1960's inside grill first, took a picture, and then dropped them in the trash. It felt like a small funeral — not a dramatic one, but the quiet kind, where you pause for a second and think well, that chapter's closed. I bought my first Slingbox sometime in the mid-2000s. The concept was almost absurd for its time: plug this little box into your cable box, point it at your home network, and watch your TV — your actual TV, with your actual cable subscription — on any internet-connected screen in the world. It was the kind of product that made you feel like you were living in the future while everyone else was still figuring out DVDs. I was hooked immediately. Not just on the product, but on the idea behind it. The notion that television didn't have to be tethered to a single screen in a single room felt genuinely radical in 2005. I...