@roraniel thanks, I was too lazy to check for myself :))
OK, I have to chime in on this love fest.
Please watch my rant about this whole Sling thing. It’s a cable company in the making ready to steal your money.
John
@Johnnyzee Did not read your rant because I am not going to worry about tomorrow. I like what it offers today and if it becomes something I don’t like I will dump it and move on just like I dumped cable and satellite. No biggie.
@roraniel No need to read, its a 5min video. That all I need to get things of my chest. The video was inspired by this thread/
I like Sling because I can cancel anytime without any issues.
@Johnnyzee, I just watched your video. From a SlingTv perspective, here are my comments.
1. You can’t get any of the shows on SlingTv via an antenna. These are all cable shows.
2. This is a huge deal for college sports fans, especially in the South (like me). With this package (including the $5 sports add-on), I can watch about 90% of SEC games in any sport. Without SlingTV, I can watch about 1% of the games (legally). I still can’t watch any games on the FSNs (Fox sports channels), but this is much better than before.
3. When the NCAA basketball tournament comes next month, I will now have 2 more stations to watch games (TBS, TNT). I always had CBS via Tablo/antenna. TNT also has a lot of NBA games as well.
4. ESPN also gives NFL access to Monday Night Football.
5. Now if you aren’t a sports fan, I don’t think Sling TV is quite as good a deal. Sports is made for live TV, while there are quite a few shows on the other channels I wish I could DVR. You are also at the mercy of commercials, many times even non-commercials (just the logo on the screen and crappy music).
6. At the moment, you are also limited to one stream per household. If I am watching a big game, my kids can’t watch Cartoon Network. There will likely be a $5 extra add on to get another stream, though I don’t plan on paying for it.
Overall, this is a great deal for some people, and not really needed by others. If you don’t care about legality and are ok watching some of them on you computer/tablet/phone, you can get almost all these channels by borrowing a valid cable email address. I gave them three months of money, and plan on seeing where this goes.
@roraniel No need to read, its a 5min video. That all I need to get things of my chest. The video was inspired by this thread/
Johnnyzee, I just checked out your video and there are a few things that you said that are not true about SlingTV. First of all the stations that they offer are not the network stations that you can get from an over the air antenna. Not sure where you got that idea from. Also ESPN does not cost extra beyond the $20 cost. There is an extra sports package that you can get but ESPN is part of the base price. I’m not going to try and convince anyone whether SlingTV is worth it or not that’s up to the individual person, but it is wrong to use mis-information to further your own agenda.
I do think that SlingTV would be a better proposition if they let you choose what channels you want for the $20 price. I’m not sold on whether I’m going to keep it long term or not, but I’m going to give a shot and see how much I really use it. The great thing is that if I find that I’m not using it, then it is a simple matter to cancel.
@snowcat, as long as there is value I’m cool with it, but I’m afraid that they might start using old cable tactics to keep you. The video is more of a word of caution.
Now if Formula 1 would create their streaming channel… I’d pay for that.
John
I understand. And I definitely agree with you that the cable/satellite companies are desperate to get some of the cord cutters back any way they can.
So this weekend I don’t have buffering issues I have poor picture issues. All week I had buffering If I had the connection set to Unlimited even though the max bandwidth I saw was 3.7 Mb/s and my connection is 50 up and down. This weekend I often get poor resolution and the max band width I see is 1 Mb/s and usually .8 even when set to unlimited. I guess I am not sure how the whole bandwidth thing is supposed to work. Starting to think the issues are not worth $20 a month. I really want to like Sling but getting frustrated.
It’s been pretty good for me. No buffering issues, and it looks like sling has stopped trying to inject commercials into the espn stream. I mostly see 1.5—2.6mbps streams. We’ll be keeping it at least until summer comes along (when we don’t watch much TV)
Sling TV sort if fixed their problem with WatchESPN. If you select SlingTv as your provider and you have the sports pack, you have full access to all ESPN3 and SEC+ programming.
The one strange issue is that if you are watching Sling TV on one device and then watch something on WatchESPN, you are kicked out of Sling, just like you watching Sling on another device. However, you can just restart Sling, and both programs will play fine. But if switch to a different sports show, it will kick you out of Sling again.