A dog's life in Portland Oregon.: Review of Sling TV.

I finally got around to using my Chromecast offer for 2 free months of Sling TV. While it's just been two days, I'm confident that I can offer a fairly good review of Sling TV's service.

What it is

Sling TV is a service that allows you to watch a handful of traditionally cable-based TV channels. Its $20 basic service includes the History Channel, TNT, ESPN and ESPN2, AMC, the Food Network, A&E, HGTV, IFC, Disney Channel, TBS, the Travel Channel, Maker, Polaris+, El Rey, Adult Swim / Comedy Channel, ABC Family, H2, CNN, Lifetime TV, Bloomberg, and Galavision. There are multiple add-on packages including HBO, a Sports Extra package, and a variety of Spanish packages. Immediately, you'll notice that Sling TV is geared towards people who are looking to cut the cord on cable TV, by streaming video through their internet service.

In my experience, I haven't had cable TV for over a decade, so my sensibilities on this are different. As a Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Viki, YouTube user who binge-watches shows and enjoys on-demand video, SlingTV requires going back to the old paradigm of tuning in at a scheduled time, to watch any given show. Essentially, the primary benefits to me, are live events such as news and sports; I had just subscribed to SlingTV when the Paris attacks had occurred, and having CNN gave me real-time access to what was going on. If you're not a news junkie or a sports fan, this might not be the service you're looking for.

While there is no cloud-based DVR service, there are a few shows / videos that can be streamed, under the "Available Now" section. In some of those videos, you can go forward 30 seconds / rewind 10 seconds. In other videos, typically movies, you're able to simply pick on the timeline to move to that point in the movie.

Also included with Sling TV, is a rental section of movies, with separate prices for SD and HD rentals. They're generally the same prices as what you'd find in the Google Play Store / iTunes, for better or worse. Given the greater flexibility of rentals in Google Play Store, I'm inclined to stick with GPS instead of renting from Sling TV.

There are no service fees or term-based contracts, which is a huge positive, unlike cable TV service. If you only care to watch ESPN for football and football news, you can sign up for service in September, then cancel at the end of February. The money you save, is staggering, compared to cable TV service, but the video quality is not necessarily the best, and you can't record games on your DVR. Even though the app gives you the ability to set the data speed, you're still stuck with issues of network congestion that are irrelevant to your ISP's speeds.

When it's working and there are no buffering issues, the service is fine. But at times, there is significant congestion to the edge network (Sling TV host), even as the ISP's speeds are normal. Therefore, regardless of your device, your Sling TV experience will depend on your ISP's relationship with Sling TV as an edge network -- if you've had problems with your ISP and Netflix, you can probably expect the same issues. Even if you're watching videos at 2:00 am, the video will downgrade at times, which points to my ISP (Comcast) actively scaling bandwidth to edge networks, to minimize the gap between use and capacity.

Sling TV and Chromecast

With a Chromecast plugged into your TV, you can use an Android or iOS device, with their app, to cast their service to your TV (you can also access Sling TV, via apps, in your Amazon Fire TV, Roku Player, Xbox One, and Nexus Player). The Chromecast setup is not ideal; the initial connection takes about 30 seconds or more, while changing channels takes about 10 seconds, and buffering may delay live video by several minutes. With ESPN, there are some live video (games) that are blocked from casting to your TV; there is no way to determine which games will be blocked, making this a significant issue.

Their mobile app also, obviously, allows you to watch videos directly via your device. I used it to watch one football game on ESPN while I was watching another one on the big TV, via OTA digital, but of course I have a tablet with a 12.2" screen so my experience is much better than someone with a 10" or smaller screen.

Sling TV and Windows / Mac

Sling TV also has an app for Windows (W7+) and Mac (10.6+), but as it stands right now, I would not recommend installing it, as it is buggy and has other flaws.

While the app looks nearly exactly like its mobile version, the desktop app does not allow you to cast it to your TV -- that does not make sense to me. However, because I have a 24" monitor for my desktop, it's not too much of an issue, as I often watch videos from my monitor.

Installing the app in Windows 10 will mess with your Chrome's Chromecast extension -- it made my Chromecast device disappear from within my Chrome browser -- and if you enjoy casting from your Chrome browser, at least for now, I would strongly urge you to avoid installing the Sling TV app on your desktop.

While watching videos with the desktop app, there were odd buffering issues where the audio would overlap itself with a separate, delayed track. The video would also, at times, jump around or cut out completely. The only means to fix this, was to switch channels, and that's a terrible option when watching live sports.

In my opinion, they could easily fix this by throwing away their app and making a cloud service accessed via a browser. By doing so, they'd also give ChromeOS users a means to access their service. Why they built their own desktop apps, is beyond comprehension, and seems rather short-sighted.

Conclusions

I think Sling TV has huge promise, but as it currently stands, is hobbled by limited and buggy apps. Also, unfortunately because of my ISP's relationship with Sling TV's owner, DirectTV, it seems that despite FCC's Net Neutrality rules, Comcast will make Sling TV difficult to use as an absolute replacement for cable TV.

If you don't have to worry about your ISP's indignation of edge networks, I'd say that Sling TV is a very good choice for anyone who loves sports, and cable cutters. Otherwise, you might find that the laggy and buggy experience is not worth the $20 a month.

And while they've added some foreign channels in add-on packages, they're desperately missing Asian-language channels -- something that would prevent many people from leaving cable.

I'm making use of my free two months, and perhaps at the end of that period, Sling TV folks will improve their relationship with Comcast and fix their apps. Since I'm not planning on subscribing all 12 months of the year, it's still a palatable service to pay for, even with all its flaws. Still, I wouldn't be able to recommend this to everyone; I'll only recommend this service to those folks I know who can take care of their own technical service issues.