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