If you’ve tried Sling, tell us what you think about it!
My daughter is a big Pac12 fan. Sling is about the only place she can watch the games. Everyone else seems to have written the West coast off.
I have had SlingTV since 2019. They just “forced” me to upgrade my AirTV player to the latest model.
There are many things I don’t like about it. The only thing good I can say about it is that I can now record two local channel programs at the same time, which is a big plus for me. Unfortunately, everything else SUCKS! I liked the old player much better. It now does not have a separate remote as I now must access Sling on my Roku. The guide sucks as I cannot organize my channels the way I had before. The AirTV player has many glitches. Two channels that came in before are now breaking up most of the time. Scheduling programs is very annoying. There is often a long lag between when I enter it and when it shows up as being scheduled. There is one movie that I watched two months ago that I cannot cancel the scheduling of as it does not have the “Recording Options” box. I have to play “Whack a mole” and delete it every time it shows up on the schedule. Programs that are set to record all new episodes do so a few times then stop scheduling them. You now also must use the Sling app on a smartphone to scan for channels. I have Comcast broadband 100Mb service yet programs are constantly buffering. That never happened with the old player. If another service can come to matching Slings price, channel options, and local channel solution I would switch. I just started looking recently.
LIMITED TIME: Sling TV deal for new customers
$40 a month for streaming?
Back in the late 60’s I did a radio commentary (H.S. Radio Station) about cable TV charging for what we once got fro free. True, cable TV started as a way to bring TV to places which could not get TV signals such as outlying areas. It was not about the content, it was about getting reception. Flash forward a decade or two and we started getting the ability to watch TV directly from satellite. I am not talking DISH TV and current providers, I am talking about getting the same signal as the cable companys and TV station affiliates were getting. Providers would get their signal to an uplink site, it went up to a satellite and the satellite beamed the signal over a wide area. TV stations and cable companys would receive that signal and distribute it. I too received that signal at my home through a cheap receiver and dish I got at a hamfest/swapmeet.
Although prior t othat I paid for cable, now I could have the world for very cheap. You could pick some sports programming meant for bars which we individuals could watch fro free but establishments had to pay for. Home Box Office was free because they had not yet started scrambling the signal. They also had no idea how they would charge individual households. HBO shut off around 11pm or so for the East Coast while the west coast feed lasted another 3 hours.
The cost to get a lot of contect was about $1 a day after the services scrambled and you had to pay. Many services had an east coast and a west coast feed (now streaming services with specific start times include an on-demand ption). With the east/west feeds you just switched channels on the same satellite and re-watched. The C-Band satellites had 24 channels. KU band was new at the time and offered different programming. To change channels you just pushed a button like changing channels on a TV. To change satellites the dish (or part of it) would move. All those TV satellites were in an arc over the equator. That giant dish was a collactor of a signal to direct them to the antenna. The antrenna for the satellite receiver was less than an inch long.
So anyway programming, for that $1 a day I got (east and west coast where available), HBO, Showtime, The Movie Channel, CNN, Headline News, WGN, WTBS, The Outdoor Channel, Cinnemax, all the news feeds and raw news feeds. Also the pre-transmissions of network shows sent to be recorded by networks to use at their time slots. I saw Star Trek, Newhart, The Wonder Years and many more all in advance, up to a week in advance before the general public; all on my cheap little system with better video than the cable companys offered their subscribers. The raw news feeds were commentators standing in one spot doing an ID for each station they were contracted with “For WXYZ this is” For KRON-TV this is", etc. I watched the O.J. trial with multiple camera locations happening simultaneously. I could watch Canadian TV, get radio and music feeds meant for stores and personal use. It was like sitting on top of Mount Olympus looking down at the world. Little did I know it at the time, but I would soon work for a company making satellite TV receivers and other receivers destined for NASA and the space shots.
All that TV reception for $1 a day. Granted inflation and the idea to scramble and charge for content has been implemented all over and I understand why. But in the early days (when we were tredging to school for miles, uphill, in the snow, in the dark, in our bare feet), it was more than a novelty, it was TV!
Today I subscribe to ver few services like Hulu with ads (the Black Friday deal), Amazon because of shipping which includes movies, I was sharing Netflix but my Sister cancelled so I signed up for the AD version and I share Paramont. I watch a lot of Pluto.TV and other free services and put up with ads. There are a few current and recent shows I have been watching but I also enjoy the free and very old ones like Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, Mission Impossible and so on. I don’t need to watch ‘The Game’ which seems to feature different teams each week 
I am just too old to pay tyo watch all that fancy/schmancy content of the day fearing that I will miss out on some show. They all will live forever out there, certainly longer than I will!
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You can do that with HDHomeRun’s 2-channel tuner and record up to four at once with their 4-channel model. And the video format is accessible with any MPG player sp you can edit, store, etc.
Cost is one-time $100 for 2-channel and $200 for the 4-channel and $30 a year for the station guide.
Yes I know but the AirTV 2 was free. It would cost $100 to get the same 2-channel ability and another $100 for 4-channels. At least I assume it would be bug free. I guess you get what you pay for!
I like the fact that I can copy the files to portable storage and take it with me to watch any place I want. I can edit them and strip the commercials.
So very true…
I currently have Sling. I am generally pleased with that with the exception of sometimes the commercials come on early and cut off the show at an inappropriate time. The thing that I like about Sling is that you can switch back and forth between orange and blue. I generally watch shows on the blue selection, but if there is a sports game going on that, I want to see, I switch it over to Orange. You can do that as many times as you like, so I sort of have the orange and blue for the price of just the blue.
Orange has pretty much what I need but I find myself watching Sling Freestream almost more than Orange these days. It has a huge number of channels in just about every genre and, of course, it’s all free.
Where can find Sling Freestream? I’ve never heard of it.
Thanks
Has anyone looked at the reviews on the internet? I went on line on my TV and 99.9% of the reviews were 1 star. Looks like it really sucks.
I have Hulu but want a service that doesn’t cost me $83 and
Sling looked like they have nearly all channels I want.
I didn’t see a single good review.
Are the reviews wrong? Usually reviews are skewed towards the positive.
Don’t know where you were looking at reviews but the ones I see are decent within the limitations of the service. I’ve had it for years. It has a channel lineup options that work for me but might not for you. I have the orange service plus one add on package. I hardly ever use the DVR because I can always go back several days to watch something I missed. I live near enough to a city that I get the major channels OTA and don’t need to rely on a streaming service for those. Prices have probably more than doubled since I first subscribed but are still reasonable compared to other services and what I was paying for cable when I cut the cord. I can’t remember having had any significant technical/billing/service issues with Sling.
I turned on my smart tv and in the Search box typed Slingtv. Next page shows “Apps and games” just above sling. I click on “sling”. Scroll down to “Customer Reviews Top Reviews”
50 Reviews
Interesting. FWIW I searched on DDG for average rating of Sling TV reviews and the AI returned “generally positive around 4 stars”. I pulled up individual sites and found about the same except TrustPilot. There it has a 1.1 rating. (Hard to find a streaming service there that had even a 2 star rating.) Most of the complaints are about customer service and billing and many appeared to be self inflicted wounds on the part of the reviewer. I’ve had it almost 10 years and have never needed customer service so can’t comment on that.
The Clark.com comparison:
https://clark.com/technology/tvsatellite-cable/best-streaming-tv-services/
Indeed. Whenever you look at reviews of all kinds of subjects people tend to look with a skeptical eye at reviews that are somewhat skewed towards the positive, so I thought this was rather unusual to be leaning towards the negative.
I have had SlingTV since 2019. What SUCKS is the AirTV2 for OTA programs. Many glitches!
Many can be fixed by just unplugging it and waiting 10 minutes and replug in. Sometimes the problem can be fixed by unplugging my Roku Ultra same way. From reading many posts on Reddit a lot of the problems are because the AirTV 2 has “weaker” tuners than the old player it replaced with one tuner. I never had these problems with it. Fortunetly I got it for free and like they say “You get what you pay for!”.