A Maverick Move
“How disruptive can Sling be when it is owned by a major distribution partner of Hollywood? You can hardly blame Sling's founders for taking the money, and if they had a choice of similar partners, EchoStar was a good one. Charlie Ergen's outfit is as close to the maverick end of the scale as a Hollywood partner can be, but that ain't very close.”
David Mercer, Strategyanalyticshttp://www.strategyanalytics.com
History Replaying?
“Just as the DVR did not take off until DirecTV and EchoStar started pushing the technology to their own customers, I would expect the same thing to happen with Slingboxes. But instead of EchoStar trying to design an inferior version of a Slingbox and push that on its TV subscribers, as it's done with DVRs, at least this time it is starting out with the best technology up-front.
Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunchhttp://www.techcrunch.com
Slinging the Knowledge
“EchoStar is in heavy competition with DirecTV (and the cable companies) today, and needs to start bolstering for the pretty much already-in-progress war with the Internet for TV. Sling brings not just the cool gadgets and yet-to-be-released Clip+Sling technology to the company, more importantly it brings know-how.”
Jeremy Toeman, Live Digitallyhttp://www.livedigitally.com
DirecTV In the Dust
“What is DirecTV doing? It's had problems rolling out HDTV channels through its satellite network so far, so it could be the one left floundering here if EchoStar's position as two separate companies with a hot-company acquisition all goes through soon.”
Brian White, BloggingStockshttp://www.bloggingstocks.com
Closed-Off Source
“We can only hope that EchoStar doesn't start making Slingbox sets that are exclusive to the EchoStar service. A move like that would undermine the very flexible ideals upon which the Slingbox was built.”
Charlie Robb, AVGuide.comhttp://www.avguide.com
Shifting Early
“By acquiring Slingbox, EchoStar is in an excellent position to be an early player in the place-shifting game. The company can continue to sell standalone Slingboxes to non-satellite customers. And EchoStar can integrate Sling technology into its existing products, putting the company far ahead of the competition when it comes to place-shifting.”
Brad Linder, TV Squadhttp://www.tvsquad.com
