I'm going to guess SlingTV is a different product then, not usable by or tied to the boxes? That seems to be the thing they kept hammering when I still had to put up with commercials. If SlingTV is a box independent service and a SlingBox is only capable of showing an active cable subscription, then yeah, I agree it seems useless. But the cable boxes have had some form of DRM for years. I wonder what kind of agreement they must have had to allow Sling to do that?
Sling boxes are not related to SlingTV service or those Sing Airtv boxes.
I don't know if they ever got them working with HDMI. The last one I used went from the component outs. I guess it could be useful if you wanted to use your parent's cable box to watch MASN, but that's probably a pretty obscure use case when you can use their TV Anywhere login for most other channels.
