IP Democracy: EchoStar to Buy Sling. What About SlingCatcher?

The big news while you were sleeping is that DBS provider EchoStar is buying place-shifting pioneer Sling Media in a deal valued at $380 million, cash and stock. The deal seems to be a good one all the way around -- Sling gets to exit the knotty consumer electronics business and EchoStar gets technology (watching your own personal in-home video options anywhere in the world) that could differentiate the number two DBS company from its competitors.

Paidcontent.org's Staci Kramer snagged an interview with co-founder Blake Krikorian (the other co-founder, Jason Krikorian, will be speaking at The New Video Summit, btw), who said that despite the new parent company, everything will stay the same at Sling. "We expect very little change to our business except that we have even deeper pockets, and access to other core technologies," he told Staci.

The timing of the deal is interesting indeed. Sling is slated to release soon its new SlingCatcher platform, which stirred a lot of interest at CES last January. SlingCatcher was touted as a "radically new approach" to melding Internet video with the TV set, enabling consumers to wirelessly project web video to their TV sets.

More intriguingly, SlingCatcher enables consumers to retrieve web-based video for TV set viewing without the PC serving as a middleman. The suggested price for SlingCatcher is under $200.

According to Ryan Block at Engadget, the SlingCatcher is now called, awkwardly enough, the Slingbox Catcher and just received the FCC's seal of approval. That means this device could show up on shelves relatively soon, just in time for the 2007 holiday shopping season.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on September 25, 2007 7:48 AM to IP Democracy