Looks like all that pent-up demand for SlingPlayer for iPhone has caused the suits at Sling to go mad with greed -- the company just posted up a page saying that owners of every older SlingBox save the Slingbox PRO will have to upgrade to a Slingbox SOLO or Slingbox PRO-HD in order to stream to iPhones. Yes, this is totally ridiculous: we've been told that the limitation is purely money-driven and that previous builds of the iPhone client worked just fine with older Sling hardware -- hell, if a Palm Centro can stream off the original Slingbox, there's no reason at all the vastly more powerful iPhone can't hack it. Sling's offering a $50 credit to owners of older hardware, but honestly, we can't say some token coupon is going to take away from the bitter taste of a forced upgrade here -- unless Sling comes up with legitimate technical reason for crippling such highly-anticipated software like this, we'd say it's about to piss off a lot of formerly-happy Sling customers.
