The Slingbox was a TV streaming media device made by Sling Media that encoded local video for transmission over the Internet to a remote device (sometimes called placeshifting). It allowed users to remotely view and control their cable, satellite, or digital video recorder (DVR) system at home from a remote Internet-connected PC, smartphone, or tablet as if they were at home. On November 9, 2020, Sling Media announced that all Slingboxes have been discontinued, and that the Slingbox servers will close on November 9, 2022, making all devices "inoperable". History The Slingbox was first developed in 2002 by two Californian brothers, Blake and Jason Krikorian, who were avid sports fans. They supported the San Francisco Giants, a Major League Baseball team whose games were broadcast regularly by their local TV station. However, when travelling away from their home state, they found they were unable to watch their favorite team because their games were not carried by television stations in other parts of the United States and could not be found for free online. The first edition of the Slingbox came to market in late 2005. Future Slingbox hardware is getting a second life thanks to the Open source Slinger project, written in Python. Technology Hardware The traditional Slingbox embeds a video encoding chip to do real-time encoding of a video and audio stream into the SMPTE 421M / VC-1 format that can be transmitted over the Internet via the ASF streaming format. Later Slingboxes also support Apple's HTTP Live Streaming, which requires support for H.264. The Slingboxes up until the Fourth Generation (or Next Generation Slingbox) used a Texas Instruments chipset. Current generation Slingboxes and OEM products are built around a ViXS chipset. Control of the hosting video device, usually a set top box, is done through an IR blaster, which, on older Slingboxes, required the use of an IR blaster dongle. Current generation Slingboxes have built in IR blasters on the box itself, though customers can opt to continue to use the IR blaster dongle. All Slingboxes include an Ethernet port that connects to a local network and out to the Internet. The Slingbox 500 was the first to include built-in Wi-Fi. Cloud infrastructure Sling used an Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure to support encoding, relaying streams and analytics. It also sourced data from multiple repositories to help guide recommendations to users, including social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and specialty