Sling TV First Look Sling TV First Look Less than three weeks after Dish Network CEO Joseph Clayton announced the company’s new $20 per month, Internet-based streaming TV service, and a few weeks before its public launch (Sling hasnt set an exact launch date yet, but has assured us its coming soon), we got an invitation to try out Sling TV. We’ve been using it in our labs and in a home environment for around a week. Here are our first impressions: What do you get for $20 per month? The basic Sling TV package has 12 channels, including ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, The Disney Channel, the Food Network, TNT, TBS, and Cartoon Network—a cleverly designed list of some of the most popular basic cable channels. There are also two $5-per-month add-on packages: Kids Extra (which includes Disney Junior, Disney XD, Boomerang, Duck TV, and Baby TV) and News & Info Extra (HLN, Cooking Channel, DIY, and Bloomberg). We tried the full suite of channels, which total out at $30 per month. It’s an incredibly tempting deal for anyone who’s ever wondered why they’re paying $50 and up, plus a monthly fee for a cable box, to get hundreds of channels when they only watch two or three with regularity. Sling TV is the closest service yet to à-la-carte cable TV. What you don’t get from Sling TV are any of the standard broadcast networks—so you’ll need to hook an antenna up to your TV to get ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. There are also no options for premium channels such as HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime. Looking to change your cable company? Check our our Ratings of Telecom providers. How does it work? Like many other streaming video services, Sling TV works through an app that you can install on multiple devices. At launch, Sling TV should work on streaming media players from Roku and Amazon, as well as the Xbox One, Google Nexus Player, and smart TVs from LG and Samsung. It should also work on Android and Apple iOS devices. Many cable and satellite companies offer the ability to tap into the channels and content available on your set-top box and DVR from anywhere via an app. The Sling TV app is just like that—only without the set top box. If you want to watch Sling TV on your television, you might need to invest $40 to $100 in a streaming media player, but that’s still a significant savings over the multi-year cost of a DVR or cable tuner. We tried it on a Roku 3, as well as an iPad 2 and an iPad mini (we also wanted to try it on an Amazon Fire TV, but the apps for Amazon devices weren’t ready during the pre-launch trial). For anyone used to navigating their cable or satellite service via a sequential numerical channel guide, Sling TV is a bit of a departure—channels have no numbers and they are grouped by type (Sports, Family, News, etc.). The organizational logic makes a lot more sense than assigning arbitrary numbers to channels, but its difficult to know how it would scale beyond the dozen or so channels currently on Sling TV. How does it compare with cable and satellite? In our labs, Consumer Reports TV experts set up Sling TV in a side-by-side comparison with our in-house Optimum cable feed using two identically calibrated TVs. They saw a noticeable downgrade in picture quality of the Sling TV feed relative to Optimum cable. Sling TV seemed more heavily compressed than cable, causing the images on Sling TV to look softer and less detailed. They also noticed more banding (course steps from dark to light parts of the picture where ideally you should see a smooth transition) and jagged edges around text and other rounded objects. To find the best HDTV, look through our LCD, LED, OLED & plasma TVs Ratings & reliability guide. How much you care about those issues depends on how much you care about HD picture quality. Streaming services are notoriously inconsistent when it comes to picture quality, because, like Sling TV, most of them use a technology known as “adaptive bitrate streaming.” This means the service is constantly adjusting its compression to deliver the best possible picture given the speed of your broadband connection and traffic on the Internet in general. To optimize picture quality, some streaming providers (most notably Netflix) have set up specialized content distribution servers or peering arrangements with Internet service providers (ISPs) to ensure the fastest and most reliable possible pipeline for streaming video. We contacted a Sling TV representative to ask if the company had any such deals, and were told there were none. That’s hardly surprising, considering most major ISPs are cable providers with little incentive to optimize Sling TV’s service, since it is directly competing with their own TV offerings. How live is Sling’s “live TV”? The most striking difference to us between our cable and Sling TV feeds was one of latency. Side by side, we found that Sling TV was running anywhere from one to two minutes behind the programming on Optimum cable. We even tried it at the home of a Consumer Reports editor who subscribes to Dish Networks’ satellite service and found Sling TV to be running about a minute behind the company’s own feed from space. We asked the Sling TV spokesperson about the delay, and got this explanation: “Television signals of all types are never truly live. They all have delay from the time of content was captured and produced to the time a viewer sees the signal. Since Sling TV is a new service, we have chosen to be conservative in our signal delay to allow for congestion or other potential Internet propagation delays…We expect the perceived delay will be significantly reduced over time.” Truth be told, most subscribers to Sling TV would never notice the delay. (After all, how often are you watching the same TV program from two different sources at once?) But it does raise the curious possibility that you could be watching a big basketball game on ESPN, hear raucous cheering from your neighbors’ house, and then discover what all the fuss was about two minutes later when you see the game-winning three pointer. You will probably notice a lag when you change channels. Even with a 15 Mbps broadband connection (which is ample for HD streaming), we generally experienced five-second buffering delays when changing from one Sling TV channel to another. That increased when we used the service on a 2.5 Mbps DSL connection, but we were impressed to find that, once a channel buffered, we were usually able to watch interruption-free on that DSL line. Your very own ads We noticed one other bit of weirdness about Sling TV’s service that surfaced during the review period. ESPN wasn’t showing commercials—instead, the channel would display the ESPN logo and the message “Commercial break. We’ll be right back.” We wondered what that was all about so we asked, and we were told that Sling TV would be using “dynamic ad insertion” to serve targeted, customized ads to each user. The reason we saw the “We’ll be right back,” message was that the service wasn’t up and running yet. Presumably, the dynamic advertising will be transparent to the consumer, but it says a lot about Sling TV’s business model, and it suggests that advertising on Internet-distributed TV will look a lot like it does on the web. Verdict After less than a week with Sling TV, it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about whether or not it could truly replace cable or satellite television for most users. In the end, it’s all about what channels matter to you (if you like Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, Fox News, or AMC, then you’re out of luck for now) and how much of a stickler you are for the absolute best picture quality. Sling TV is a streaming service, and it acts like an over-the-Internet product, subject to the variability and inconsistencies of whatever connection you have at hand. Then again, it is remarkably liberating to know that the option of Sling TV exists. Cord cutters no longer have to give up the most popular sports channel in the land. You can still entertain your kids with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse without having to pay for the Home Shopping Network. And if nothing else, this adds a little healthy competition to a marketplace that sorely needs it. —Glenn Derene Consumer Reports has no relationship with any advertisers on this website. 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Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:48:18 +0000
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