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Comment by compsciphd | Hacker News Reader

Just my 2 cents on this as a long time slingbox user. There was no need for it to be this way. They could make each device work without needing their servers, but they won't. Their customer service has for the longest time been antagonistic to their customers.

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It seems like Slingbox doesn't have a NAT-proof solution, and has been using their servers as reflectors, which suggests there's an ongoing opex cost for the bandwidth and maintenance that isn't sustainable.

If they'd charged a subscription fee they might have more incentive to run the servers. Too bad their focus was on "no monthly fees"!

Dish also might have an upcoming/future motive to get Slingbox users to replace it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25038249

The original slingboxes (Circa 2008/2009) ran locally, and could be exposed on your networks if you did the setup.

In 2013/2014, they changed the way that it was handled.

I have 4 Slingboxes -- one in Miami, one in Kentucky, one in Cincinnati, and one as a "backup," -- and am really kinda bummed by this decision.

Sure, in theory they could do that. But it would probably be a lot of work for literally zero payoff.

Did I just correctly hear you describe a patented innovation by VirNetX? Careful with that, Apple just paid half a billion dollar for it.

While I'm confident your reply is tongue-in-cheek, it's a sad indictment of the patent system that a half-billion-dollar "innovation" can be infringed by a few nebulous sentences on a technical forum.

Thankfully, that is not the case.

In fact, all patent applications (in the US at least) are published into the public domain. Feel free to download all of Apple's patent documents from uspto.gov, print them on T-shirts, and sell them on the street corner. *

You just can't build the devices described within the patent and sell them.

*(don't actually do this because I'm not a lawyer and their patent documents may contain mentions of their trademarks which have their own rules)

Just for fun, I didn't literally mean that the post describing the operations would infringe the patent. It only becomes infringing when that description is expressed in a way a computer understands!

Hopefully, my indignation at the absurdity of software patents is now clear.

The best options now are a TV Tuner and Plex media center. It works about the same and, the last time I remember, it doesn't require Plex to stay in business. I could be wrong on that last bit though.

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