Sling Media garners $46.6 million from Echostar and others – HD Beat Kevin Tofel is out with a story on everybody’s favorite Slingbox receiving an additional $46.6 million in funding from Goldman, Sachs, Liberty Media Corporation and yep, Echostar Communications. So not only does DISH have the most expansive HDTV lineup now with their recent aquisition of some of now defunct Voom’s HDTV content, but they may be on the way to putting together something interesting with Sling Media for remote viewing.
From HD Beat, “We’re on the cusp of broadband everywhere, which removes one the largest bottlenecks to providing HDTV programming everywhere you want, whenever you want. Once that hurdle becomes nonexistent, we’ll need new and innovative devices like the Slingbox to fully take advantage of the new era in HDTV.”
While I’m still a bit fuzzy on the economics of streaming/downloading bandwidth intensive HDTV here and now today, it would make for an interesting product offering in the future for sure.
It will also be interesting to see how Orb Networks is positioned relative to Sling Media going forward — personally I think Microsoft should just buy Orb (bad blogger, there I go giving more wacky unsolicited acquisition advice with other people’s money).
And and as a totally unrelated topic from Slingbox, what about seeing a DISH offering for HDTV content on Microsoft’s Media Center platform? DirecTV has already announced a partnership with Microsoft and once Vista ships at some point in the future you will be able to have a DirecTV installer upgrade your Media Center PC to get HDTV content from DirecTV. What about Dish?