Is crowd-funding possible to further development?

[jbondsr]

Personally, I am tired of Sling ignoring customers about their software usability and lack of support (both on the hardware and software side).

I know a lot of people out there are against crowd-funding, but if we don't do something soon, it's only going to get worse.

We need to show that there is a great dissatisfaction with their current level of service.

SlingFront has been a great alternative for me, and I do in fact get more stable speeds and quality versus using the normal Sling web player (even without a proxy).

Of course, if it were to be crowd-funded, more than likely the software would need to be given away for free, but I think the majority of Slingbox users would be fine with that, even after paying all the fees for the official mobile apps.

On another note, I noticed that the original Slingplayer for Desktop 2.0 can detect the newer slingboxes (350, 500, M1,TV, etc).

Of course, they don't tell you the FinderIDs or passwords like the old Slingboxes do, but they do exist.

If you log into the Slingplayer viewing site with your browser and connect to your Slingbox, open a new tab or window and go to this URL:

http://newwatchsecure.slingbox.com/watch/slingAccounts/account_boxes_js

If done correctly, it should show your assigned userpassword and FinderID.

Maybe it's possible to build a new or updated application around this, or to modify the original Slingplayer for Desktop to connect using this information?

(Not a programmer, so I can't comment on how difficult it may be.)

What do you guys think?

[oviano]

I think my main reservation would be that this would presumably bypass Sling's adverts, as SlingFront does and I doubt that would go down too well with Sling. At the moment SlingFront probably falls below the radar a little. Well, I expect they know about it but the number of people using it is probably tiny compared to the number of people using the official free players.

If it got to the stage where enough people were using it to cost them money then I doubt it would be allowed to continue - after all they don't offer an SDK and indeed have history of encrypting the stream to prevent this exact kind of development. Since they control the firmware on the Slingboxes I'm sure if push came to shove they could make it so that only the official players could connect to their boxes. At the moment I doubt that is in their interest - the work involved would probably cost them more money - but I'm sure it would become in their interest if they started losing money.

So in summary, in my view it's theoretically a decent idea but I think maybe it's better to of let sleeping dogs lie, enjoy what SlingFront currently gives and keep it low key. I have mine rigged up to a Harmony remote and I find it's way better than all the official players for the various devices they have supported at one time or another,

[Tom Speirs]

Just want to say, I agree completely with oviano. If it became big in any way it would likely be dead.