Slingbox, the pioneering streaming device from Sling Media, will be permanently taken offline on November 9. The “place-shifting” technology that let people take pay-TV programming with them on mobile devices (and helped foster Internet streaming), is being shelved by parent Dish Network, which announced the shutdown in 2020. Sling Media was founded in 2004 and purchased by Dish parent EchoStar three years later for $380 million. Although the Slingbox was deemed “revolutionary,” it never achieved mass adoption, ultimately getting displaced by content-focused streamers like Netflix and YouTube. But some Sling tech continues to be used by the industry.

“‘Slingbox is being discontinued due to technology advances within the TV industry,’ the notice sent to Slingbox customers said,” per Variety. “The demand for Slingbox has decreased as the ubiquitous nature of streaming devices and services has changed and modernized over the past several years,” Sling writes, per the trade publication.

“Back before just about every major TV network built a streaming app of their own, watching live TV on your smartphone was tricky. One of the first relatively simple options was the Slingbox,” writes TechCrunch, explaining “you’d set it up between your cable box and your TV, plug it into your network, and bam: you’re streaming live TV, from your TV, wherever you might be. You could even control it as if you were actually there, thanks to a spiderweb of IR transmitters you’d wire up in your entertainment center to act as your extra-remote remote control.”

In the mid-2000s, that capability “seemed like magic,” TechCrunch writes, noting that today “it’s not quite as broadly useful.”

“Sling Media was founded by brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian,” writes Variety in an epithet documenting how “the brothers conceived of the Slingbox after they were frustrated they couldn’t watch their favorite baseball team — the San Francisco Giants — when they were on the road.”

Code-named “Lebowski,” in honor of the 1998 Coen brothers’ film “The Big Lebowski,” the Slingbox “adapted the format of the video stream in real time, ‘abiding by what is possible at the time,’” Variety quotes Blake Krikorian having said, alluding to the film’s famous catchphrase, “the dude abides.”

The Slingbox’s “adaptive bit-rate video technology is now ubiquitously used by streaming services to account for variations in bandwidth,” Variety adds. Fierce Video writes that “the SlingPlayer app is still available for browsers, iPhone, iPad, Android smartphones (free version), Amazon Fire TV, Amazon tablets, macOS, Windows and Chromecast. However, the SlingPlayer apps for Android tablets (free), Android smartphones (paid), Roku and Windows Phone have been discontinued.”