There are two potential audiences for Sling TV, Dish Network’s relatively new internet TV service aimed at cord cutters: those who have wanted to ditch their cable or satellite TV subscription, but couldn’t imagine living without ESPN or its flagship show, SportsCenter, and then everyone else who has contemplated cord cutting in general. For the first group, I’d say fine – do it – $20 per month for Sling TV combined with Hulu and Netflix could still undercut your pricey cable TV bill. For the latter group, however, I’d advise a more cautious approach for the time being.
As part of my cord cutting journey, which I’ve been documenting through a series of posts on TechCrunch, I’ve been testing Sling TV’s internet TV service. For over a month, I’ve used Sling TV on my desktop, mobile devices and my Roku. The service actually runs on a variety of platforms: Mac, PC, iOS, Android and number of streaming media players, including also the Amazon Fire TV, Nexus Player, and Xbox One.
Line-Up
At its core, Sling TV is a tentative step in the right direction. It represents an unbundling of the too big, and too expensive, cable TV packages that have been forced on consumers for years. Instead, you can get a smaller package of some of cable’s better channels for an affordable price, and then pick and choose others you want to layer on top.
Sling TV offers a basic package of cable TV channels for $20 per month, including ESPN/ESPN2, AMC, A&E, TNT, Food Network, History, Travel, TBS, HGTV, Disney, CNN, Bloomberg, Lifetime, Cartoon Network, and more. You can then optionally subscribe to various channel “packs” for an additional $5 per month to add more sports channels, kids channels, movie channels, or Spanish-language channels to your Sling TV subscription.
You can also add HBO for another $15 per month, which makes it one of the few places you can subscribe to HBO without a traditional cable to satellite TV package.
When you click on one of those categories, you’re taken to a screen where instead you click through channel logos with program details beneath them, and then click on “Watch Now” if you want to start viewing a show. Effectively, it’s like flipping through channels with a TV remote, but with a lot more steps involved.
I suppose it’s not hard to figure out, exactly, but it’s not well-designed.
That, too, may change in time. The company has brought on Digitalsmiths (acquired by TiVo) co-founder and CEO Ben Weinberger as Chief Product Officer, and he’s tasked with improving the user experience on Sling TV, including making content discovery easier as the catalog grows.
Technical Issues
During testing, I ran into other problems as well. Sling TV’s search service errored out for no apparent reason at times (see below), which was frustrating because it’s the best way to reach the back catalog. Other times, it failed to find a show that you know you saw available in the guide earlier as being available on Sling TV.
In other words, if you’re used to the simplicity in navigation and search that’s provided by services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video or, in some cases, Hulu (though it often suffers from similar issues) – where you find a show and then can binge your way through a whole season – Sling TV is not for you.
The TV streams themselves played okay – I never ran into trouble where they weren’t available, though Sling has struggled with this in the past. But they sometimes didn’t appear to be of high quality – on the Mac app, the video was blurrier than it should be, but they were better on my iPhone’s smaller screen.
There’s another huge issue with Sling TV I’ve yet to address – you can only watch it on one device at a time. So basically, forget about letting the kids stream Disney in their playroom while you enjoy SportsCenter in the living room. It doesn’t work.
Meanwhile, Sling TV competes with cable subscriptions where you can pay extra to hook up boxes in separate rooms, as well as with streaming services like Netflix which let you stream to multiple screens – even up to 4 on Netflix’s family plan.
A one-stream limitation in a multiscreen world is, well, crazy.
Benefits
Complaints aside, there are some benefits to Sling TV, starting with the price. Plus, because it straddles the on-demand streaming video world and that of pay TV, you are able to use your Sling account to log into some TV apps that typically require authentication via a pay TV service. For instance, you can log into apps like WatchESPN (online and on native mobile), as well as apps like WATCH Disney, WATCH Disney Jr. and WATCH Disney XD (soon).
(I should note that I ran into errors with WatchESPN on the web, but this could be due to my test account, and they later were resolved.)
Another benefit is that Sling TV offers movie rentals from its service. The movies range from $2.99-$4.99 in price which makes it competitive with competitors. But as with Amazon Video, you can’t rent movies directly from your iOS device – you have to first rent them from another platform before you can watch them on your iPhone.
The biggest benefit of all, of course, is that you can get ESPN for the first time ever over the internet, and on your many devices.
Despite all its flaws, for sports addicts looking to cut the cord and save money, Sling TV should not be outright dismissed.
For $20 per month you could have ESPN and ESPN2 via the core package, plus more channels (ESPNU, ESPNEWS, ESPN Goal Line, ESPN Buzzer Beater, ESPN Bases Loaded, BeIN Sports, SEC Network, Univision TDN, and Universal Sports) through the $5/month “Sports Extra” package; and the ability to use the WatchESPN app. And you can watch on all kinds of devices, from TVs to phones.
That’s not an awful deal for live sports fans.
Still, the overall experience of using Sling needs improvement – from the user interface design to the VOD catalog to the feature set and beyond. Sling TV’s software and service may get better. Right now, it’s usable, if not delightful.
More importantly, though, when you tally the numbers, you might find you’re able to pay less for a Sling TV subscription – even when combined with other streaming services of your choosing to round out your cord cutting line-up – compared with what you’re paying today for your cable or satellite service. (Most consumers’ cable bills are in the $85-90 range, on average.)
Whether the bottom line is more important to you than the feature set and functionality, however, is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.
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