The trouble with OTT: Not ready for Prime Time?

Tom Paine

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With all the complaints about DirecTV Now, I've got to say Dish's Sling TV has big problems, at least on my MacBook. It crashed at least five times the other night while I was trying to watch basketball, and rebooting is a painfully long process. Its seems to be getting noticeably more unstable rather than less. I've been a user for over a year.

Some people have told me they don't have those problems on other devices, such as Roku, though I see that there have been some on that platform as well. I thought closing all other apps might help, but it really doesn't. Reinstalling the app (prescribed solution) might help sometimes, but doesn't always, and its a pain to do over and over again.

There are a legion of similar complaints on the web.

I never have problems with Netflix and YouTube. Of course, those are different delivery systems, and Sling TV's troubles appear to be mostly (though not exclusively) with live broadcasts, not canned.

There are still industry-wide technical challenges with OTT that need to be addressed. 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch (Fox owns about 1/3rd of Hulu) says Hulu remains “very, very focused” on avoiding the kinds of technical hiccups that have haunted DirecTV Now and Sling TV when it launches its own broad OTT offering later this quarter. We'll see.

Sling TV is celebrating its 2nd birthday this weekend with a free weekend trial that has less than a day to go. A full week trial is available if you put your credit card on it and remember to cancel at the end of the week.

Sling TV is estimated to have 1 million subs, several times more than either DirecTV Now or Playstation Vue.

Update 2/24: Since I wrote this piece, the problems I've been having with Sling have magically almost
disappeared.