Your Slingbox Will Be A Useless Brick In A Few Years

Found on Techdirt on Saturday, 21 November 2020
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This week, Sling Media announced that all Slingboxes will effectively become useless paperweights in a few years. In a company announcement, it says the technology will no longer work at all as of November 9, 2022.

It's yet another example of how in the modern era, you simply don't really own the things you buy. Firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation 3. And with everything now relying on internet-connectivity, companies can often give up on supporting devices entirely, often leaving users with very expensive paperweights as we saw after Google acquired Revolv, then bricked users' $300 smart home hub. Now it's the Slingbox's turn to head to that great gadget graveyard in the sky.

So, more perfectly working hardware that's being turned into junk, just because.