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Sling TV is a real thing

theverge.com/2015/1/5/7491071/dish-sling-tv-ott-internet-tv-announced-ces-2015
This is kind of nuts and potentially super awesome though we will have to see the full details to know if it's truly worthwhile.
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Comments

  • Fucking finally. I've been getting rumors from friend working for distribution at disney that something with streaming was happening, but he didn't know who or when. Glad to see that come to fruition.
  • The problem with this is...

    $20 a month is too much. Even people who use it won't use it enough for it to be worth $20.

    It's still live TV, probably with ads. If I'm paying money I expect there to be no commercials whatsoever, and I expect to be able to watch any show I want at my own convenience.
  • Too little, too late. The people (myself included) who got rid of cable years ago aren't going to go back and sign up for it.
  • The perfect complement to your Netflix subscription is coming this month
    One is $20, the other is $7.99.
    No a la carte channels, but you can add on "genre" packages . . . Each will tack $5 more onto the monthly $20 price — and did we mention you'll still be dealing with commercials?
    ...And you lost me.
  • edited January 2015
    I didn't mention pricing in my comment above, but let me just say that the entire Netflix collection, streaming instantly to my eyeballs, with no ads or crap, is worth around $8/month to me. Even if I weren't jaded by cable companies constantly being dicks to everyone (especially their customers), I wouldn't pay $20/month (or more!) for this service. It is literally an order of magnitude higher than it's worth.

    EDIT: This isn't some entitled, "millennial" attitude, by the way. Just simple economics. The supply of media (especially TV shows) is so great that I could spend every waking moment for the rest of my life only watching the best shows ever made in the history of television. When I decide if I'm going to watch something, the opportunity cost alone is what I'm usually weighing my potential enjoyment against, not even dollar cost. (Hence why paying $2+ dollars for an episode of something on Amazon, while a negligible amount of actual money, seems needlessly expensive.)
    Post edited by YoshoKatana on
  • No AMC, FX, or HBO? What is the point?
  • This would be worth it in one case: You can pull a netflix and split an account with another person or so.

    I'd be fine with this for sports if I could be assured of having all the sports teams I want. If there's even a wiff of area-based blackout....
  • Eh...I'd pay. I need my Mythbusters, Top Gear (UK and USA), Counting Cars, Mystery Diners, and Restaurant Impossible.
  • Apreche said:

    The problem with this is...

    $20 a month is too much. Even people who use it won't use it enough for it to be worth $20.

    It's still live TV, probably with ads. If I'm paying money I expect there to be no commercials whatsoever, and I expect to be able to watch any show I want at my own convenience.

    So when you tune into the hockey game and they go to an ad break, what do you expect to happen? The station logo and "We're in a commercial break" that you get on Watch ESPN?
  • Apreche said:

    The problem with this is...

    $20 a month is too much. Even people who use it won't use it enough for it to be worth $20.

    It's still live TV, probably with ads. If I'm paying money I expect there to be no commercials whatsoever, and I expect to be able to watch any show I want at my own convenience.

    So when you tune into the hockey game and they go to an ad break, what do you expect to happen? The station logo and "We're in a commercial break" that you get on Watch ESPN?
    That would be nice. Or, how about just commentary during the break. Or a random Youtube video. Anything but an ad. ;^)

  • Discussion here is totally off base. I predict people absolutely will pay $20 for this service, just not us! I couldn't give two shits about the content of those channels, and I also have the same gripes with ads and such, but I wouldn't be surprised if, say, my wife signed up.

    I would say that the intersection of people who would want these channels and people who desperately want to stop dealing with cable companies, their shitty cable boxes and dvrs, shitty customer service, etc., is sizable enough to support something like Sling TV. If it fails, it'll be because of shitty marketing and mismanagement by Dish.
  • RymRym
    edited January 2015
    Problem 1: a lot of the people who want this don't have fast Internet, an HTPC, a newer streaming-enabled television, etc... They'll have to make their Roku or whatever work with is, which might be hard for them.

    Problem 2: They already admitted that ESPN won't stream fully to all supported devices: that problem likely won't be resolved soon.

    Problem 3: It's still live TV.

    Problem 4: No HBO, so it's just one more subscription.

    Problem 5: Since it has ads anyway, it competes directly (aside from sports) with Hulu for television.

    Problem 6: Extremely limited "channel" selection means that the kind of person who wants this probably wants a couple more channels. Those are another $5/mo each, and they aren't all even available.

    Post edited by Rym on
  • Actually, the real problem is ESPN. That's the only part of this that is newsworthy and the only part most people care about. The other "channels" are along for the ride. If ESPN makes its own offerings down the road or starts playing ball with other services, this thing dies overnight.
  • As with everything it depends on what you watch. If I want to watch the big American pro wrestling TV shows live I need cable or I need to go to a shady streaming sure which is probably full of viruses. If you want shows with no ads running live, you get things like WWE having its wrestlers shilling Sonic on the middle of the show, it becomes part of the body of things. Those of you who want live TV with no ads are literally asking for the impossible unless you have a BBC broadcasting things under a government mandate.
  • I'm fine with TV dying entirely, replaced fully by paid content.
  • If this thing didn't have Roku support it'd be dead in the water already, but there is a gray area between us and the completely technologically incompetent crowd. They have Rokus and they know how to use them, but they still consume content in ways that I cannot possibly understand.

    Problem #2 above is a big one. Things like that could also do it in.

    There are pitfalls all around this thing, but I still believe that if those pitfalls are avoided, it will be seen as a solid product offering by many people. I really wish that we could say, as a generation of people, that we have moved past the point of wanting to pay for shitty live tv peppered with ads, but I walk past these people every day. There are a lot of them.
  • Pro sports die if TV dies. The sidelines and whatnot are covered in ads and all but the biggest teams still struggle for cash.
  • People are definitely prepared to pay for their sports teams. That's not a question. I wonder to what extent pro sports advertising revenue is dependent on the "it just happens to be on at this restaurant/airport/random public place" eyeballs.

    I love having an antenna and an HTPC. It's telling that the broadcast networks are already starting to view over-the-air customers as leeches and thieves.
  • I have found that it is significantly cheaper for me to either:

    A: Wait a day to watch a show online.
    B. Wait months for the show to find its way to Netflix.
    C. Buy each episode off of Amazon as it becomes available.

    For the few shows that I do watch I can either wait, pay $3 per episode or pay $90+ a month for a cableTV package that includes the channels that air the shows I watch.

    Sports IS cableTV these days. Among the people I regularly associate with the only ones that still pay for Cable are the ones who watch sports (or are very old and watch a ton of TV).
  • Don't forget option D: Pirate. Free. Any time. No ads.
  • Starfox said:

    Don't forget option D: Pirate. Free. Any time. No ads.

    That may not cost money but it costs time and does not always provide acceptable results. I have less free time than money at this point in my life so spending $3 on Amazon for an HD stream is "cheaper" than spending the time to try and find a good pirated stream online.

  • HMTKSteve said:

    Starfox said:

    Don't forget option D: Pirate. Free. Any time. No ads.

    That may not cost money but it costs time and does not always provide acceptable results. I have less free time than money at this point in my life so spending $3 on Amazon for an HD stream is "cheaper" than spending the time to try and find a good pirated stream online.

    Who said anything about a pirate stream? BitTorrent. There are tons of torrent listing sites. Find one you like and bookmark it. Getting a torrent is as fast as typing in the search query and clicking the link. BitTorrent is FAST, especially for popular things. Even my weird Korean hour-long variety shows finish downloading before I can make a sandwich. Adventure Time episodes download in seconds.
  • An episode of the Daily Show downloads via torrent faster than the first ad's runtime (if adblock is off).
  • How quickly can I get the torrent onto my TV with a roku box? Or onto my tablet? Onto my game console attached to my TV?

    I don't want to sit at my PC and watch nor do I have an HTPC.
  • HMTKSteve said:

    I don't want to sit at my PC and watch nor do I have an HTPC.

    And now you begin to see the error of your ways. HTPC > all other boxes combined.
  • edited January 2015
    HMTKSteve said:

    How quickly can I get the torrent onto my TV with a roku box? Or onto my tablet? Onto my game console attached to my TV?

    I don't want to sit at my PC and watch nor do I have an HTPC.

    Once the file is downloaded you can pull videos through your network via the Roku Media Player (I may be slightly off on the name). You may need something like Home stream or Plex to help it along, but it does work.
    The problem is that if too many people torrent, we get even more conservative companies putting out only the most focus tested bland pieces of bland out there. Everything can't be carried by Kickstarter and Patreon.

    Post edited by Hitman Hart on
  • edited January 2015

    The problem is that if too many people torrent, we get even more conservative companies putting out only the most focus tested bland pieces of bland out there. Everything can't be carried by Kickstarter and Patreon.

    That's horse shit. Since the introduction of YouTube, BitTorrent, etc. we've seen an explosion in the quantity and variety of content produced, and these technologies are more prevalent now than ever.
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • VLC streamer works pretty seamlessly to get video from a HTPC to an iPad. When on the same network, you can use the app to browse all files that have been queued up. Stream them in-home, or download the file for out-of-home viewing.
  • Rym said:

    Apreche said:

    The problem with this is...

    $20 a month is too much. Even people who use it won't use it enough for it to be worth $20.

    It's still live TV, probably with ads. If I'm paying money I expect there to be no commercials whatsoever, and I expect to be able to watch any show I want at my own convenience.

    So when you tune into the hockey game and they go to an ad break, what do you expect to happen? The station logo and "We're in a commercial break" that you get on Watch ESPN?
    That would be nice. Or, how about just commentary during the break. Or a random Youtube video. Anything but an ad. ;^)

    You know what? No. You don't want commentary during the break.

    Here in Europe the streams of NFL games are usually the Sky TV broadcasts. Sky Sports does have commercial breaks, but due to it being a paid channel, they don't have anywhere near the number of breaks during an NFL game than Fox or CBS.

    And so in that time, instead of the break, they do more commentary and analysis. And it's the most tedious things ever. There's really only so much they can say, and they don't have the instant replay ability of the on-site commentary team. It just drags on, even more repetitititititive than the usual commentary.

    On cruise ships they show ESPN coverage, and on the "Caribbean and Cruise Ship" channel they only show commercials for shows and matches and sports on their own channels. These repeat so regularly they become background noise only. Very ignorable. Way more ignorable than the commentary on Sky or the real commercials on Fox or CBS. And sometimes they show direct feeds and have a static card during breaks.

    "Anything but an ad" isn't the best in reality.

    Personally I'd like to see a scrolling view of Twitter during the breaks, showing the most-fav'd or top retweeted or otherwise curated tweets about the match over the past ten minutes. Because, you know, that's typically what I'm scrolling through on my iPad during sport commercial breaks anyway.
  • During the inaugural year of MLB.tv, they really didn't have their shit together yet. Not to mention that I was able to get around the blackout in the first place and make the product usable, but they didn't have any sponsors lined up for the vast majority of their ad slots between half-innings. Many times it would cut to black, other times the cameras would just never shut off. It'd just switch to the high angle shot over home plate. Every now and then, they didn't even cut the mics from the broadcast booth!
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