Sling's ‘M1’ streaming box brings built-in WiFi at a lower price
It's been nearly two years since Sling unveiled new placeshifting boxes, so it's high time the company brought its products into the year 2014. The firm just announced two refreshes, including the entry-level M1 …
Context & Ripple Effects
The M1 ends a long hardware drought: Sling's last major box was the PRO-HD shown at CES in 2008, and the interim strategy leaned on software — the iOS app overhaul and Roku channel added in November 2013 put Sling on other companies' devices while its own boxes aged.
Built-in WiFi is the quiet headline here: it retires the external-adapter era that began with the SlingLink powerline approach of 2007, cutting both setup friction and bill-of-materials cost, which is how the entry price comes down. The pickup across USA Today, The Verge, TechHive and others shows the refresh landed as mainstream news, not enthusiast news.
First-order effects
- Entry-level buyers get a cheaper on-ramp to placeshifting, and Sling gets a hardware line it can finally market alongside its refreshed apps instead of relying on Roku and mobile platforms for distribution.
- Anyone still wiring a Slingbox through powerline or add-on adapters now has a reason to replace rather than repair older units.
Second-order effects
- Cheap WiFi inside the box pressures streaming-box rivals — including Roku, which hosts Sling's channel — because the same living-room port is now contested by a device that ships with Sling built in.
- Lower hardware pricing shifts Sling's economics toward volume and whatever monetizes the installed base (app sales, service tiers), a pattern competitors will have to match on price rather than features alone.
Third-order effects
- If sub-premium pricing becomes the norm for placeshifting hardware, the category consolidates around whoever controls the software layer across devices — boxes become loss-leader-ish gateways to apps and subscriptions, echoing what happened to set-top hardware generally.
- Widespread cheap placeshifting also raises the stakes with pay-TV providers, whose retransmission and authentication rules shape what these boxes are legally allowed to stream.
The trend: Living-room video hardware is moving from expensive single-purpose boxes toward low-cost WiFi-connected devices whose value lives in the cross-platform software around them.