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sling media

Sling Gets A Shakeup, Kirkorian Bros Out

by Jason Wilk on January 12, 2009

  • A year after Sling Media’s was sold to EchoStar, co-founders and the top team at Sling Entertainment are leaving the company. Aside from co-founders Blake and Jason Krikorian, Jason Hirschhorn (President), Ben White (Chief Creative) and Greg Wilkes (VP-Sales) are exiting the company as well. Under the terms of the sale, each of the senior executives agreed to stay for one year. Sling Media, popular for it’s DVR that can record shows and stream them to your phone, computers elsewhere, was purchased for $380 million. EchoStar may or may not be in trouble here. After winning back-to-back ‘Best of Show’ at CES and Macworld, the company may be able to move on without the senior team allowing them to cut costs.
  • Current COO, John Gilmore will take over for now. As for the team leaving, President Jason Hirschhorn promised EchoStar he would get the programming and integration through QA on new products and present them at one more CES conference. Now that CES is through, the team is ready to move on. Serial entrepreneur Blake Kirkorian must have something in the works, so keep an eye out for yet another groundbreaking product in the digital media space.

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Sling Launches Its Hulu Competitor, But On A Leash

by Jason Wilk on November 25, 2008

slingbox

  • Sling Media, the company behind the popular Slingbox TV-streaming hardware devices, has finally launched its widely anticipated streaming video portal much like Hulu on Sling.com
  • Sling offers content from most of the major networks and studios including Warner, Sony, and MGM.
  • Arrested Development in on board, but unfortunately The Daily Show and Colbert Report aren’t available such as on Hulu.
  • Sling’s leg up in the space is due to it’s DVR hardware device that let’s you stream any content saved to the box on any computer or your TV. This isn’t much of a plus for those with HDMI cable’s and right now streaming is only available for Window’s users that have downloaded the plug-in.
  • More importantly, Hulu has Sling by the balls, because most of the content on Sling is being licensed from Hulu (better yet, NBC/Universal). This will certainly hold them back from being a head-to-head competitor as most are trying to hype it to be.
  • It’s going to be pretty tough to knock Hulu off it’s high horse right now, especially for players like FanCast (what happened there Comcast?)

TC

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