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Class Action Filed Against Sling Media
New submitter DewDude writes: In case you missed it; Sling Media has been forcing advertisements into video streams from Slingbox devices unless you pay for a client application, which is only an option for Apple, Android, and Windows 8 devices. The issue will now head to the courts, as two plaintiffs have filed a class action suit against Sling Media, claiming the company participated in 'bait-and-switch' tactics by charging users for the hardware, then monetizing the streaming of content. The suit notes that Sling does not own the rights to the programming into which they are inserting advertisements.
Guess it's going to be interesting to see if the court allows Sling box to insert advertising on streams it doesn't actually own or pay to have rebroadcast rights.
If they are not broadcasting the original commercials and are adding their own into them, then it's sounds to me like that would be illegal. Wonder if this decision will have ramifications on how advertising is handled via hardware makers that are not content producers.
Be seeing you...
Other people make nice derivative works, not add ads. I wonder if they're getting nailed for $10,000 per infringement, or is that only for the little guy?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
i do not use commercial media players instead of a small desktop and xbmc/kodi
Captcha: shelved
This is why i still use the windows program they killed off some time ago when ever possible. that webui crap they forced on us with ad's is complete bs.
The ads started appearing back in like, November. It started out as a youtube-like ad in the browser client; which at the time was the only PC based way of watching the units. Then they started hard-coding them in to the new desktop application. At first, you had the option of skipping after so many seconds; but lately they've been advertisements between :30 and 2:30 that have no way of skipping them.
They are not actually inserting advertisements in the video stream; but what they are doing is requiring you to watch one before it will begin playing your TV. As many pointed out Youtube does this; I also point out to people that I don't buy hardware to watch youtube; where as I've purchased a physical piece of hardware as well as subscribe to a TV service to utilize the hardware.
To make matters worse; Sling has seemingly gone downhill in customer support. When you question the advertisements to them on social media, you don't get a response; you get silenced and banned from that social media page. If you talk about it on the forums; they will delete the posts. They're going to great lengths to not only hide the fact you will get advertisements from them in this manner; but even greater lengths of blatantly ignoring customers.
The whole issue with this is they are in fact monetizing your viewing; which is the exact same thing Aereo got shut down over. I'm getting the feeling that they were taking the one judge stating Singbox is not retransmission in a manner they weren't supposed to; and decided to monetize every time you connect.
I get that they have server maintenance to pay for; but it's not like they quit selling Slingboxes; and no one was actually complaining when it was an un-obtrusive banner ad displayed on the client plugin. But the fact they're basically making you watch an entire advertisement that does nothing but benefit them; so you can watch TV you pay for, on hardware they own; they've just taken the "evil corporate" route.
Blake Krikorian, their co-founder, graduated from UCLA so you just know he's one of those Republicans. Plus, he is 47 so at his age his wealthy kind typically becomes hateful and unemphatic.
What do you mean "pay for the streams". Sling doesn't pay for the streams. You're paying for the streams by subscribing to cable TV; you're paying for the bandwidth because it's your internet connection you're streaming from; you've also given them a couple hundred bucks for the hardware to do this.
Except he's not connected to the company anymore; Echostar owns it.
So the obvious question here, is why would anyone subscribe to this? If I had been using a service like this and it started inserting ads everywhere, I'd drop it immediately.
Advertisements are something I simply will not tolerate in any media. Ever. It's done. I quit watching advertisements the moment I got cable TV back in the 80s and abandoned even that when all the stations became just like the crappy network channels. I've never tolerated ads on the internet.
I'm just not going to watch ads. I can't believe anyone would. It is literally a waste of your time.
The whole Start menu is one big advertisment. Everything is about directing you into Microsofts Services or the Windows Store. All baked in. Nice.
Except he's not connected to the company anymore; Echostar owns it.
Who is ruled by the founder of Dish that still owns 52 percent of it. Plus, he is a well-known xian. His sect of choice is Episcopalian. He is from Tennessee and went to that Republican-scam fake school University of Tennessee that doesn't prove a real education. Also, he has five children. Five! You just know he's one of those CONservatives.
Amazon tried doing that to me with prime instant video on my Kindle, until I pointed out that I paid good money for the option of not having advertising on my Kindle, and that in my opinion that included while watching prime instant video. They quickly modified my account so I no longer see those ads.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
...when someone would get around to this.
I work for one of the big cable companies. We use slingboxes at hub sites which are remote or just not staffed 24/7 in order to be able to verify whether or not video service is working, particularly after maintenances which may affect video.
A couple weeks ago was the first time in awhile that I've had to verify it myself, and I was very surprised to see ads popping up before the live tv stream kicked in, and I was thinking 'that's.... not right'. I'm not terribly surprised that there are some consumers who are pissed off enough to sue.
It's one thing if the service is free. With Youtube, we kind of understand that they have to show ads in order to keep the service free. But when something I paid for in order to use starts shoving ads at me, I tend to get a little ticked off too.
I'm curious, does Netflix do the same thing? Show ads before you start streaming? I don't remember that being the case, but I stopped using Netflix after their price hike fiasco.
If they don't currently do this, and Sling Media wins the suit, I'll bet my bottom dollar they will.
The only difference was when Ergen was running the show; the company was total bad-asses in the customer service department. Prior to his departure as CEO; it was a pretty decently run company.
broadcast tv: free
original cable tv: paid, but commercial free
mature cable tv: paid with commercials
sling: paid hardware, paid cable tv and commercials
new sling: paid hardware, sling commercials, paid cable tv, and cable tv commercials!
I've owned a Slingbox since the mid-2000s and been very happy with the service. For those unfamiliar, you hook it up to your set top box and it rebroadcasts your signal over the internet and provides things like a remote control library so you can manage your device 100% remotely.
When I first got it, it came with Desktop software for Windows and Mac. This was replaced with a plugin based web interface a few years ago. For iOS and Android devices you have to buy a (rather expensive) dedicated app. I thought this was good value for money so invested. It's especially useful as I travel abroad a lot and UK-based services are almost all geofenced.
In the past 6 months they have been putting advertisements in the web app. Because Chrome has deprecated NPAPI, they released a Desktop application again (the old one doesn't work properly on recent versions of OS X). This Desktop app now inserts mandatory advertisements.
As a long-time customer it's infuriating! I paid good money for my Slingbox which originally had a Desktop app with no ads. The sale promise was "Watch TV anywhere with no subscription". I consider advertisements a subscription.
Now there's one hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is!
subject box.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Commercials or nothing morons.
That's an easy choice, at least. I'd rather have nothing than help feeding a buch of parasites, considering that most of what gets streamed is empty calories with artificial flavours.
On a different note - with your skills at pleasing the crowds with sweet words, surely you must be in advertising yourself? What advertiser still haven't managed to grasp is that when people avoid adverts, it isn't because they are subversives with a communist agenda tryig to take away fundamental rights. They are simply sick of advertising and advertisers that show no respect for anybody, unless they are forced to at gunpoint. Advertisers appear to shamelessly lie, cheat, invade our privacy and steal time and space from us - and the effect is that most of us loathe advertising, and most of us subconsciously or consciously decide to place our shopping elsewhere.
Hopefully, in the future, businesses will learn to not spend money on idiotic advertising that only alienates their customers, but I'm not optimistic.
I can smell this one a mile off. The MBAs aren't interested in making a profit. They learned at school that the only goal is to maximize profits. So, they had the brilliant (yeah right) idea to start putting ads in their service. They then consulted the attorneys, who as always take the attorney's view that "if it doesn't specifically say we can't do that, then we can do it, and even if it does specifically say we can't do that, a good attorney can always find a way." The MBAs loved that one, so they said, "sure we might get sued, but screw it! Let 'em sue us! Our attorneys can win, and even if we lose, it's still a net win because our advertising fees will outweigh the legal penalties."
I miss the old days when profitable companies simply stuck around year after year making a quality product, and you knew what you were getting before you bought.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This is actually the reason I did not purchase a slingbox. It was to be one of my seven year-old's birthday gifts (the other being a tablet). However, I went with Amazon Prime instead when I saw you have to pay $15 for each app and then they throw their own advertisements (which may or may not be age appropriate) over the top.
it's your internet connection you're streaming from
Is that really true? Or does the entire stream get proxied through Sling's servers because it's not trivial for something behind NAT to be a server?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Not
--sf
AT&T Charges me $7/month for my stupid DSL modem, on top of hijacking my DNS queries and serving with with ad-ridden search pages when I go to an NXDOMAIN.
I don't see a lack of equivalency here, so I will be watching this case closely.
It is trivial for something behind a NAT to be a server. It's not trivial for a service behind a NAT to be discovered. That's why there are so many NAT service discovery services these days.
USD 280 + USD 15 a pop per app, per device + extremely curated user experience - no thanks. It seems that Hauppage has a similar offer. Don't know how it compares to the Slingbox, though.
My cellphone ringtone is a ring tone.
In most cases, yes; the slingbox client software will attempt to connect directly to the box using TCP; the boxes automatically issue UPnP commands to open the ports. Barring that, they will attempt a UDP connection. IF that fails, they *will* proxy a stream; but it's a much lower quality. The ads are showing up on the direct TCP connections; so...essentially...I'm getting shown advertisements for something that's using my own resources.
Anyone interested should look into one or more of the following alternatives. They don't add any ads to the experience as far as I know. The exception being Tivo, but my understanding is that their ads don't interfere with watching the content. Each of these alternatives have varying levels of openness and freedom ranging from truly FOSS to not FOSS/OSS at all...
Ceton's products: http://cetoncorp.com/
Silicon Dust's products: https://www.silicondust.com/
Kodi's offerings: http://kodi.tv/
Tivo's products: http://www.tivo.com/
I'm getting shown advertisements for something that's using my own resources.
If they are doing that, then they are definitely being assholes. If they don't have to proxy the connection, then it's not costing them bandwidth. If they are running a service to let you find or connect to your box (due to stuff like not being on a static IP), that's a little bit of effort on their part, but not much.
If their only contribution is requiring you to go to a web site to connect to a box when you could have reached it directly with older client software by typing in its IP address, fuck them.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
you to is them.