I’ve had intermittent issues with the Sling/Roku 4/ESPN connection when trying to watch MNF. The picture would degrade - presumably to meet any bandwidth constraints. Sometimes it’d just stop. I never really had the issue on other Slinf channels - only ESPN.
Last night for fun (you know your life is sad when this is considered “fun”) during one of these “am I watching this in 240i?” moments, I start the ESPN app on Apple TV and it worked perfect. No issues.
The Roku 4 picture degrade and the video freezing is a firmware bug I am fairly certain. It’s not a bandwidth issue.
The one thing I wondered is if the two devices were going to different sources i.e. ATV going to espn.com and Roku/Sling going to sling.com. Maybe Sling was bandwidth constrained? Dunno.
But - other Sling channels seem to work ok.
Can you get all the ESPN channels on Watch ESPN by using Sling as your cable provider? I can only get ESPN. Can’t get some of the others that I would love to watch for games that are not big enough to be on ESPN or ESPN2.
I have never seen any freezes with Sling, only an occasionally degradation of picture quality. Nothing too terrible though. The worst I’ve see was during a football game where the picture degraded for 10 seconds or so.
You get what you subscribe to. So if you have the basic SlingTv package, you will just get ESPN and ESPN2 on WatchESPN, plus all the ESPN3 content. If you have the sports package ($5 more), you will get all the ESPNs plus the SEC Network channels.
Sling on my Roku 4 has been really rough. Pretty constant degraded picture…followed by the LPW spinning-wheel. What really irks me, though, is if I then press “up” to the channel guide while the LPW wheel is spinning and then reselect the SAME channel, it almost always immediately starts playing at HD quality. If the bandwidth is there to support an HD stream…why is it going to LPW? Definitely seems like a firmware issue to me.
Sling on my Roku 2 4210 is also rough for the same reasons. I don’t think I will be extending this sub past my 2 month free trial. I have the latest Roku firmware.
That’s odd. I have used Sling on an older Roku 2 without issue. I have also used it on both generations of Amazon Fire TV and not seen anything like that. As I said above I will see occasional degradation in the picture, but never for long.
My devices are all hardwired.
Sling on the Nvidia Shield has been outstanding for me. It is good on the Fire tv and ok on my Roku 4. I have had Sling since it was in beta and it really has come a long way.
It’s running v7.0 build 8863…which I think is the latest for the Roku 4. I didn’t have problems nearly to this extent on any of my Roku 3s. WatchESPN is also a bit of a pain on my Roku 4. About 50% of the time when returning from commercial break, the audio becomes distorted and sounds like it’s going through one of those old-school voice-changer/disguisers. The only way to fix it is to exit out and restart the stream…and then it’s fine until the next commercial break. That’s an issue I never saw on a Roku 3.
I’m dealing with it for the time being, but there still seems to be significant glitches.
Tablo has been great on it, though.
I have a blog aimed at cord cutters ( http://www.cutcordinfo.com) and would appreciate if someone would take the time and write a review for my site.
I fixed the link. I had cut and cord backwards.
Roku 4 and Sling have problems. It works well on all other current Roku models.
I arrived here by using a Google search for “sling tv freezes at end of commercial”. IllBeDarned, even though your post is ~15 months old, Sling TV is still having the issue of “as soon as [a certain commercial] got to the end, it would freeze at the same point! I think it happens at the transition from their ‘in-house’ commercial”. I completely agree with you and this is still happening ~15 months later on Sling TV. I have a Roku HD and repeatably and reliably, at the end of certain commercials (the Christmas Fruit of the Loom commercial during Christmas 2016 and the Subway Philly cheesesteak circa Jan 2017) it will unrecoverably freeze Sling TV. For me, no button (BACK, PLAY, rewind, etc.) works to recover, except to hit Roku HOME button, but that does not retain the point from which you were watching in your show so you can not pick up where you left off. I’ve reported the bug multiple times to Sling, but since this seems to be an old problem I can’t imagine they’ll fix it if they haven’t managed to do it in many months. I can’t fathom the mindset of a company that can’t or won’t fix a highly repeatable, high frequency, and catastrophic, high-severity bug.
Sling doesn’t have LONGHORN NETWORK, PSVUE doesn’t have Viacom. I got DIRECTV NOW WHEN IT LAUNCHED and have Go Big at $35 and free HBO
Been using Sling for 4 months now. Pretty happy with it.
My big issue tho is CNN has a lip sync problem after commercial breaks, and thus far Sling hasn’t resolved it.
I tried Sling but they didn’t have the LONGHORN Network, so I went to Vue. At the time Vue dropped Viacom stations, DIRECTV NOW launched, and it included LONGHORN NETWORK and Viacom stations, so I switched and have been with them since. I got the Go Big promo for $35 but it will be increasing to $40 in August.