AT&T Wireless has pretty explicitly dropped the hammer on Slingbox owners, amongst others, via their revised terms of service:
customer initiated redirection of television [...] to a mobile device [...] is prohibited
Some speculate this language is in response to oversized and unintentional roaming fees. Others believe AT&T has “oversold” or is approaching their network capacity and this is a way free up bandwidth. I have a more pessimistic, Net non-Neutrality theory in that AT&T would prefer we subscribe to their limited selection of MobiTV television content in lieu of streaming home video (which I’ve already paid for). Regardless of the reason(s), I’m not a happy AT&T customer today.
Assuming that they’re for real and intend to aggressively go after Slingers, AT&T has a few methods at their disposal to prevent or limit streaming. By default, a Slingbox broadcasts on port 5001 - so that would be an easy target. However, folks can easily modify their placeshifter to communicate via a bit more web friendly like 443. AT&T could block access to Sling’s FinderID DNS-esque directory service. Requiring customers to figure out their own, likely rotating, home IP address. They could also throttle or drop persistent connections, analyze packets, yada, yada. Hopefully, AT&T is just blowing smoke and is primarily concerned with limiting bandwidth usage. As in: perhaps they won’t bother anyone who stays below that 5GB monthly cap. Guess we’ll find out…
