Sling TV: on mission to cut US viewers' ties to cable television

I have an awful confession. I do not own the most ubiquitous domestic gadget of them all: a television set.

After moving to the US a couple of years ago, I never got around to buying one. I already have more screens in my life than I can handle, what with smartphones, tablets, PCs and a digital projector. Netflix, iTunes rentals and YouTube provide more than enough to watch without shelling out $50 to $100 a month for live cable or satellite TV, on top of the $50 or so for broadband internet. Also, I've never felt I need a regular television set because I don't watch regular TV, the sort that has dozens of channels to flick through.

For all the hype around "cord cutting" - when customers ditch cable and satellite subscriptions - I am part of a minority. Barely 3 per cent of US households go without a TV set.

Now a new service is taking aim at the estimated 12m US homes that do not have cable. Sling TV, subsidiary of satellite provider Dish Network, offers online streaming of live television from a selection of well-known channels for just $20 a month, with no annual contract. This internet broadcasting service is in invite-only testing at the moment, with a public launch expected shortly.

Sports win

Sling TV complements Netflix and YouTube, while adding a killer feature that is very hard to find (legally) online: live sports. For the first time, ESPN and ESPN 2, the two most popular sports channels in the US, are part of the basic $20 bundle. Other live channels include CNN, Disney, TNT and Cartoon Network.

Sling TV works on iPhones, iPads and Android devices, as well as the Roku 3 set-top box for big-screen viewing. Samsung and LG's smart TVs, Microsoft's Xbox One and Amazon's Fire TV devices will follow, it says.

Getting ESPN on board is a breakthrough, but many big names are missing, including other sports channels - which means no Super Bowl football or Major League Baseball - and some popular sources of drama: no HBO for Game of Thrones, which plans its own cable-free streaming service; no AMC, maker of Breaking Bad; no Showtime, which shows Homeland.

Moreover, Sony is testing a competing service: PlayStation Vue will have some of the content Sling lacks, such as Fox's drama and sports channels, CNBC and Nickelodeon.

This patchwork of content rights will perplex British readers, who have been able to watch shows from the BBC and rival stations online for some time. In the past couple of years, BT and Sky have made it possible for customers to stream live football for the same price as broadcast or less. The US cable market has been harder to crack open. It is striking that this watershed moment has come not from Apple or Google, which have tried to figure out new ways into the living room for years, but from Dish, a "traditional" satellite network.

US media companies license content with strings attached. You cannot record through Sling TV and on-demand viewing of previous broadcasts is available only for certain channels. ESPN and Disney ban pausing or rewinding live shows, now standard on cable boxes. Also, for reasons that are not obvious, the ad breaks on ESPN are filled with a blank screen and elevator music that almost made me wish for something more entertaining.

Viewing points

While such differences are annoying, the rest of Sling's user interface is intuitive, both on a big screen and on mobile devices. You can browse what to watch next while watching a live show and channel hop as you would on a proper telly.

Watching via Roku on my digital projector, on a speedy 80 Mbps broadband connection, picture quality was indistinguishable from broadcast and there was little or no lag or buffering over several hours. But some users might soon run up against their internet provider's bandwidth limits, due to the data requirements of all that video streaming.

The verdict

For all its achievements, Sling TV has one big flaw. If you are not a sports fanatic or news addict, is there anything left on live TV worth watching? Most of the best shows head to iTunes, Hulu or Netflix soon after broadcast. Cord cutting is as much about choosing a few great things to watch a lot as about ditching expensive cable services. Sling TV is technically and commercially innovative, but much of the content to watch on it is not. Perhaps I'll hold off buying that TV set a little longer.

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