Your Experiences with Sling TV

@tbellucco LOL. You too. Same response, different cable company. Also found out all the little things that they were nickel and diming me to death on. Also found out the things that they were not charging people for anymore, but failed to notify me and left it on my bill. I am very happy with Tablo. Yes a few glitches, lose a recording here and there, but I have enough other shows recorded. I laugh to the bank on what it is saving me a month.

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What are the UI options for this Spectrum TV Stream Plus? It sure looks nice. (But I donā€™t live in Charter territory anyway).

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Did you call them or did they call you?

Where are you? From what I understand, it is not everywhere charter is?

I have been debating giving them a call. $12.99 for all locals and HBO is a pretty good deal even if they do include a broadcast fee on top. It is still as cheap as HBO Now and you have backup for locals.

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And of course the sales channels (HSN, QVC) are a must but not the news channels LOL. Actually that is how my wife prefers itā€¦

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More issues with Sling and ESPN this past weekend. One more month left in my initial 3-month subscription, still feeling like I wonā€™t be keeping it. Not watching TBS, TNT, Food, etc. as much as I thought we would, and with their ESPN issues thereā€™s no reason to keep it.

I tried sling on my Roku units. It was ok I guess. I was not a fan of paying $20/mo for commercials with some content in between so I dropped off after a month.

My experience has been pretty much the same. I have been with them since the beginning. Day time into early evening it runs fine but during prime time or top rated shows like TWD Sling falls apart. I have been trying patiently to wait for them to get the bugs worked out but honestly after 10 months of problems my patience are growing thin. I have a robust network. Gigabit Ethernet throughout the house, Cisco router, commercial grade gigabit Ethernet switch, dual homed ISPs, one 30Mbps connection the other 20Mbps. Tap, tap, Sling.

My experience for the last month with Sling has been excellent. TWD is flawless, week after week. ESPN (on Sling) will occasionally downgrade the picture for short periods of time, oddly this also happens from time to time with HGTV. Go figure . . . Overall, Sling is improving steadily over the last several months.

When I want to watch ESPN, I fire up the WatchESPN app, and have much better luck. The WatchESPN app is free when you have Sling, so no extra cost involved.

Northland Tablo what streaming device are you using? In the last month I have had two good weeks with TWD and two bad weeks.

This has been my experience as well on an Nvidia Shield tv. I am really enjoying Sling now after getting through the initial hiccups. With more competition, I expect it to continue to improve.

I am using a 2015 model Roku 3, hardwired ethernet connection to my switch, which has a 40mb down connection with Centurylink DSL.

I have noticed that the DSL service provides me incredibly consistent download performance. When I had Comcast cable for my internet, my download performance was all over the board, and never as fast as advertised by Comcast. I am no expert on internet performance or topology, but I think the DSL connection is direct to the local telephone switch, I donā€™t share my connection with anyone else. I think with cable, you are sharing your cable bandwidth with everyone on the cable ring that runs through your neighborhood.

Anybody who has specific knowledge of the technical details between a DSL connection and a cable connection to the internet, please feel free to jump in and elaborate.

I could not get MNF last night to play on Sling so I switched to the WatchESPN app. It worked for a bit, then it too started buffering (constant ā€œLoadingā€¦please waitā€¦ā€) so I shut it off too. This leads me to believe the issue is not necessarily Sling but that ESPN canā€™t handle the traffic. Too bad Yahoo was able to stream an NFL game practically flawlessly for the entire world. The Yahoo Roku app worked perfectly for us that day.

Also a couple of weeks ago a college game I wanted to watch was on ESPNU which I am now getting through Sling for the extra $5 per month. I tried to tune to that game through WatchESPN and it did not appear in their guide. I called a friend who has TimeWarner and doing the same thing, and it showed up in his WatchESPN guide. Odd.

Whole house is hardwired with gigabit and my TW service is 50mb down. At the time ESPN was having issues I went into the Sling settings screen and it showed only 4.7mb down. Did a few other speed tests and all other sites were fine, at normal cruising speed. Nobody else home, no other streaming going on at the time.

I donā€™t really get buffering, the stream will just suddenly stop and not pull up again. Only happens during high demand shows. Iā€™m running dual homed ISPs with a 30Mbps connection on one 20Mbps on the other. I too am running Roku 3s. Cisco commercial router and commercial switch. House is wired for Gigabit Ethernet.

Thatā€™s what I see on Sling, too (ESPN just goes black). If I switch to WatchESPN it buffers.

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Same deal here although the problems I saw mirrored the problems with Tablo. On the Roku WatchESPN app, I got the Loading Please Wait message AND then the Roku rebooted! After everything came back up, I got the LPW message several more times. I switched over to the Sling ESPN channel and everything seemed fine until they went to break and it froze like it always does when switching from whatever commercial block to another one. I backed out and clicked it again and it was fine. This whole Tablo/Roku thing may be more of a Roku problem than Tabloā€™s. I didnā€™t think to bring up the game on PC so canā€™t confirm itā€™s solely a Roku thing.

If I am not mistaken, Sling has capped the bandwidth to 4.7 on the Roku and Android tv. It was 2.6 on the Shield tv and they finally increased it a while back

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