Sling working to restore streaming access

From CNET News.com Sling Media is scrambling to address service issues that have left many of the company's users unable to access their Slingbox video streamers during the past several days.

For the uninitiated, Slingbox is a "placeshifting device." Connect it to a video source (cable or satellite box, DVR, TV antenna, and so forth), and the Slingbox digitizes the video output for access on a wide variety of PCs and smartphones--essentially allowing access to your home TV anywhere you can access the Internet. At least, that's the case when Sling's service is working properly.

The official support thread on Slingbox's Web site starts documenting the current spate of problems as of Thursday. However, I was encountering access problems on my Slingbox as early as Tuesday.

When asked to address the cause of the outage earlier this weekend, here's what a Sling spokesperson said:

"It is the result of a data migration process that, while carefully planned for a long time, still had a number of unexpected problems. Things have gotten better for some users over the last 24 hours, but they aren't nearly good enough for everyone yet. We are working hard to get things back up to our normal levels service."

Sling's support forum indicates that the company "made some changes [...] that seem to have addressed many of the problems" (as of Saturday night), but subsequent user messages indicate that many customers are still encountering difficulties and delays in logging in, while others are blocked from accessing their Slingbox streams altogether.

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