EchoStar buys Sling Media for $380 million
Echostar, a satellite TV provider, has purchased Sling Media, the maker of the Slingbox device that lets consumer record and play television shows on computers and mobile phones, for $380 million.
Sling raised two rounds of funding for a total of $56.6 million,
Echostar participated in its second round — a cool $46.6 million in January 2006, that also included investment from Allen & Company, Goldman Sachs and Liberty Media.
It previously raised $10.5 million in a November 2004 round from Mobius Venture Capital, DCM (Doll Capital Management), Hearst Media Corporation, and others.
DCM, Sling’s largest VC shareholder, made a 10x return on the investment from its first round alone, it says, calling the purchase one of the “most successful post-bubble exits among consumer-device plays in digital media.”
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.