SLING TV

Sling TV comes to us from the folks who run Dish Network: it's Dish's farsighted offering to the 12 million or so households (in the United States) that don't have cable (satellite, etc.).  Sling offers a small subset of channels that can only be found on Pay TV.

Like cable or OTA, Sling delivers live TV channels.  There are two main differences between Sling's content and that of the cable company. The first is that Sling delivers their content over the internet: like Netflix and other streaming companies do.  The second difference is the price: Sling costs only $20 per month for its basic package; you can add more packages for $5 per month each.  There's no contract with Sling: you can cancel whenever you want with no penalty.

Here is Sling's current offering of basic channels

ESPN and ESPN 2.  The two main sports channels come bundled into the main package.

CNN:   The well-known news network also has a live feed.

TBS and TNT:  In addition to their regular programming, you also get all of the sports events that are only found on these two channels.

More channels offered include: History and History 2, A&E, Disney, Food, HGTV, the Travel channel, ABC Family, Cartoon Network, Lifetime, and Bloomberg, among others.

Here is a full list:  https://www.sling.com/package

On the same page, you'll also find 9 optional packages, each costing $5 per month.  Obviously all aren't for everybody.  There's a sports package, a movies package, three extensive Spanish-language packages, a world-based news package, a kids package, and lifestyle package.  For $15 a month you can get HBO, although you only get one channel of HBO that I know of.

To help you decide what you want, you can find the complete current Sling lineup, both basic and extras, here:

http://slingtvguide.com/

Sling also appears on TitanTV, covered in a previous post as an "Over the Top" provider.
http://www.titantv.com.   You can combine Sling and OTA into one lineup, which I'll cover in a later post about TitanTV.


THE GOOD:  Sling is obviously much cheaper than cable.  While you can't record it, some channels allow you to play content from the last 1 to 7 days.  You can also watch Sling from a PC or laptop or from your smart phone or tablet.

THE BAD: As stated, you can't record it yet.  Several channels don't allow you to play previous programs or to rewind.  Being a streaming service, there is sometimes a pause of a few seconds while content buffers.  This is only a minor annoyance, except to those who have the patience of a gnat.  And you can only have one stream running per account; you can't send this to every TV in the house simultaneously, although any TV that is hooked up can use it at any one time. For that reason, Sling isn't a good option for households with multiple TVs running at the same time, if all of the TVs want to access Sling's content at the same time.  Of course, you can purchase multiple accounts of Sling to cover that.

Overall, Sling is a good deal for $20, but as they say on TV: "Wait, there's more!"

THE FREE ROKU 2:

If you prepay 3 months of sling ($60 plus tax), they'll ship you a free Roku 2 to use it on.    The Roku 2 was the subject of an earlier post.  Since the Roku 2 generally sells for about $60, this is a good way to either get a free Roku 2, or to buy the Roku 2 and get free Sling TV for three months, depending on how you want to look at it.