sling tv

Sling TV Review

Sling Television – I heard about it in the spring this year and was intrigued. Finally a low-cost solution for watching sports – yes it includes ESPN and ESPN2! I’m an avid college football fan and every Saturday is GameSling TV Day! I listen to college football podcasts and in general spend all of Saturday watching games.

We’ve used Cox Cable for years and its worked for us. I used to be able to start and stop the extended cable plan, but in the last year or so, they decided to add a fee when you make changes like that – very annoying. So when we moved this spring, we just stopped cable all together and we’ve been actually very happy without it – and we save $50-60/month.

Now, it’s football season and it was time to really check out Sling.tv. I went to their website to see what other channels they have and it’s really very decent.

Sling.tv Channels

Below are all the channels included in their $20/month package. It’s a month-to-month subscription – no contract, no approval needed, just make an account and type in your credit card information and you’re ready to go.They do have add-ons for HBO (+$15/mo), more sports (+5/mo) and other add-on packages that are $5/mo. more.

I took advantage of a special deal they’re running right now – purchase 3 months up front and get a free Roku streaming USB device, or get 50% off the Roku 3 or Nexus devices. I got the streaming Roku stick – a $40 value – what a deal!

sling tv channels

 Sling.Tv How-To

You can get a free 7-day trial to see if you like how it works. There are very clear instructions on how to get it set up on your TV. You do need to have a TV with an HDMI port – most newer TVs have these. I have an Amazon Fire stick on one TV and a Roku Streaming Stick on another. So I looked at the instructions, plugged it in and had my Amazon & Roku logins handy and connected Sling.tv to my accounts. I was already using my Amazon Fire Stick to watch Amazon programming. These streaming devices also contain other apps, i.e. Netflix, movie channels, etc.

Sling.tv Devices

You can put the Sling.tv app on Amazon Fire TV, Roku devices, XBox or the Nexus Player. There are apps for Android and iOS.  When you plug it in, it walks you through a pretty easy set up. Printed instructions are available too for the devices. Then go to your Roku/Amazon/XBox account to sign in on the device, and then to your Sling account and sign in. Then you’re ready to go.

One big thing to know – you can only watch Sling.tv on one device at a time. So I would like to have sports on at least 2 different tvs from time to time when I go from room to room, but when you start another session up, then it disconnects from the first one. I wish it would be smart enough to know I’m watching from the same place instead of trying to cheat and share my login with different people.

Accessing Channels

If you’ve used other streaming services, like Amazon, you’ll be right at home navigating through Sling.tv. Below, I have photos of the Amazon app and then one from Sling.tv. On this tv, I use the Amazon Fire Stick and I could pretty easily figure out how to navigate through the channel lineup for Sling.

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Some channels on Sling TV
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Amazon Home Screen

Buffering/Slow Periods

I’ve  watched Amazon Prime videos quite a bit and everything works great about 98% of the time. There are those times, however, when it’s just buffering too much and the video will stop. Seems its only happened two times. So far, this hasn’t happened with Sling.tv. I’m thinking it’ll happen at some point – just hope it doesn’t during a game!

So that is pretty much it. If you’ve done any streaming with Netflix or Amazon, this will be easy. If you’ve never tried streaming services, I think it’s easier than navigating the clumsy software of the on-line tv websites (like CBS and USA networks).

If you have a device, it’s only a $20 investment/cost for a month. Remember the free 7-day trial. No contracts and quit when you like.

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