Sling TV’s interfaces for the iPad and the Roku have been developed to support their respective platforms while sharing a similar look and feel. I could activate and deactivate the closed captioning with a touch of a button. Outside of some rare stuttering of the audio, the live TV and VOD streams generally looked vivid, crisp and bright on my Samsung 1080p HDTV set. That message never appeared in my few hours with the service on my home WiFi network – it always seemed to run smoothly. On occasion, when the service had to buffer due to a lack of LTE bandwidth, the screen would go black and post a message telling me it was “catching up.” On LTE, it sometimes took longer for streams to build, to switch channels and for visual elements of the UI to populate on-screen. Generally, it took two to three seconds to switch channels – not perfect, but not annoying, either. When accessed at home on WiFi, the video stream spooled up quickly and filled up the screen with HD goodness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found that the service worked best over my home WiFi network (running 802.11n from a high-speed cable modem connection) on the Roku and the iPad than it did when I accessing it via tablet using LTE. That’s particularly helpful here because the Sling TV service (like all OTT services) runs on unmanaged, best-effort broadband connections that aren’t in Dish’s control. Sling TV uses adaptive bit rate streaming (a capability EchoStar acquired through its $45 million purchase of Move Networks back in 2011), meaning that the bit rate and quality/resolution of the video fluctuates based on the amount of bandwidth available. No calls to customer support to have my diaper changed no truck roll required. I just plugged in my user name and password, and I was streaming live TV channels moments later. Once the Sling TV app was downloaded to those platforms, the sign-on process was Netflix-simple. For this multi-hour review of the service, I ran it on my own iPad Air and a Roku 3 unit that Dish loaned out. With all of those factored in, here’s what I had access to: (ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, HGTV, DIY Network, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel, CNN, HLN, Bloomberg Television, Cartoon Network, ABC Family, Disney Channel, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Boomerang, Baby TV, and Duck TV), plus a video-on-demand library. More on that later.įor the purpose of this review ahead of Sling TV’s commercial launch (expected to happen in the next couple of weeks), Dish set me up with a set of credentials that provided access to the core service, a 12-channel package it calls “The Best of Live TV,” as well as channels included in its “Kids Extra” and “News & Info Extra” packs, which will each cost an additional $5 per month. While the variety of programming packages offered therein will need to evolve and expand to ensure that they can appeal to different segments of this small but growing group of consumers, I found that the technology underpinning Sling TV to be solid and reliable, backed up by a slick user interface that is easy to learn and navigate.īut that’s not to say that Sling TV is saddled with some initial limitations (no unified trick-play support, for example) that could lead to customer frustration.
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