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Sling: AT&T Lied About Sling's Approval?

February 5, 2010

After months of delay, AT&T finally gave the green light to Sling Media yesterday to allow SlingPlayer Mobile to work over 3G.

According to the official statement, this was achieved by an intense collaboration between the network and the developers:

Sling Media was willing to work with us to revise the app to make it more bandwidth sensitive," AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said in a statement early on Thursday morning. They made important changes to more efficiently use 3G network bandwidth and conserve wireless spectrum so that we were able to support the app on our 3G mobile broadband network.

Well, Sling Media who got in touch with Ars Technica today, is claiming that actually, AT&T wasn't totally honest in its declarations:

SlingPlayer Mobile has always contained code to adapt the stream quality to the given network conditions. AT&T has been in discussions with Sling since it was first released last year, but AT&T never asked the company to make specific modifications. No changes were made to the app's 3G streaming capabilities between its being barred from AT&T and now.

I don't quite understand what interest does AT&T have in making that up, wouldn't it make them look better to say their network just got more efficient instead of saying they had to scale down sling?

Anwayv,Sling Media is very glad that SlingPlayer Mobile has been given the official green light to work over 3G and is now waiting for Apple to release it.

Unless this statement just sent them back to Wi-Fi.

[Ars]

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