Sling Media L.L.C. (commonly "Sling Media," historically also Sling Media, Inc.) is a US consumer-electronics and streaming-technology company founded in 2004 by brothers Blake and Jason Krikorian, headquartered at 1051 E. Hillsdale Blvd., Foster City, California. It is not an independent public company: EchoStar acquired Sling Media in 2007 for $380 million, and it now sits inside the DISH Network / EchoStar corporate family, which became wholly owned by EchoStar Corporation (NASDAQ: SATS) after the December 31, 2023 DISH acquisition. Sling Media's financials are not reported separately; third-party directories estimate roughly 200–500 employees, but no authoritative headcount or revenue figure is disclosed.
Operations. Sling Media is an operating company, not a patent-assertion vehicle. Its signature product was the Slingbox "place-shifting" device plus SlingPlayer client apps, which streamed a home TV signal to remote devices. Manufacturing ended around 2017; DISH discontinued Slingbox in November 2020 and permanently took its servers offline on November 9, 2022. Sling Media also licenses an OEM platform (SDK and cloud/engineering services) whose technology is embedded in DISH receivers and in third-party set-top boxes (e.g., "Hopper with Sling," Dish Anywhere, ARRIS MS4000). A live-production switcher, SlingStudio, was also marketed.
Litigation posture. The tracked data shows 0 cases as plaintiff and 3 as defendant — Sling Media is exclusively a target, consistent with an operating company defending against non-practicing entities. All three tracked suits trace to Realtime Data LLC d/b/a IXO and its affiliate Realtime Adaptive Streaming LLC, which EchoStar's SEC filings describe as entities that license acquired patent portfolios without practicing the claims.
Notable cases. Realtime Data LLC d/b/a IXO v. DISH Network Corp. et al. (E.D. Tex., filed July 19, 2017) and two D. Colo. suits filed August 31, 2017 named Sling TV L.L.C. and Sling Media L.L.C., asserting H.264-related video compression patents (the 897, 610 and 535 patents). The 535 patent was invalidated and the 610 patent was held invalid as abstract under § 101 (D. Colo., July 30, 2021), affirmed by the Federal Circuit on May 11, 2023; the case was declared "exceptional" in January 2022. EchoStar reports Sling Media no longer faces exposure in the matter.