So CES wrapped up Friday and my Twitter feed is still full of curved TVs nobody's going to buy and a robot butterfly dress from Intel's keynote that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. But the CES thing that actually matters to me, sitting here on my couch with a Roku and no cable box, is Sling TV.
Dish announced it on press day, January 5th, and instead of doing the usual "coming this summer" vaporware thing, they just turned it on. You can sign up right now. Twenty bucks a month, no contract, and the lineup includes ESPN and ESPN2.
I want to be clear about why that matters. Cord cutting has been a thing for years now, Netflix, Hulu, whatever, but the deal breaker for a huge number of people, me included, has always been sports. ESPN specifically has never been available outside a cable or satellite subscription, because the affiliate fee ESPN charges (something like six or seven dollars per subscriber per month, way more than any other channel) is basically the load-bearing wall of the entire cable bundle. If ESPN goes over the top, a lot of people think the whole bundle starts to wobble.
So this is a bigger deal than another 105-inch curved TV nobody in this thread has ever bought.
I signed up Wednesday night. The install on Roku took about two minutes. The picture quality is fine, not amazing, sort of like watching a decent YouTube stream, and it buffered a little during a Duke game Thursday but nothing that made me want to throw my remote. The channel list beyond ESPN is a weird grab bag: TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, Adult Swim, Disney Channel, ABC Family, CNN. No local channels at all, which if you're a football person watching your hometown team on Sundays is going to be a real problem, and is honestly the biggest catch nobody's mentioning enough in the coverage I've read.
I called my cable company Thursday afternoon just to see what they'd offer me to stay, mostly out of curiosity, and got transferred three times and put on hold for twenty minutes before I just hung up. Which I guess is its own kind of data point about why people want out in the first place.
Is twenty dollars a good price? I honestly don't know yet. It's less than half what I'm paying for the bloated package I have now that includes something like 140 channels I never watch (do I need the Golf Channel. I do not need the Golf Channel). But it's also brand new, and new streaming services have a track record of adding restrictions once they get big enough that content owners start pushing back. I give it six months before there's some kind of blackout dispute or a price bump. That's not me being cynical, that's just how every one of these things has gone since Hulu started charging for Hulu Plus.
The other CES stuff, the Samsung SUHD branding, the BMW you can park from your smartwatch, Intel's Curie chip that's supposedly the size of a shirt button, none of it is something a regular person can actually do this week. Sling TV is something a regular person can do this week, tonight even, and that's the difference that gets me a little excited about it instead of just tired of hearing about it.
One thing against my own point: the app crashed on me twice in four days, once mid-game, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes me wonder if this is 1.0 software wearing a 2.0 price tag. Dish has never run a streaming product before, so I'm trying to give it some slack.
If you've got a Roku or a Fire TV and you've been holding out on cutting cable because of sports, this is worth twenty bucks to try for a month. Worst case you cancel and you're out less than a dinner for two people. I'm keeping mine for now, mostly for the college hoops, and I'll report back if the missing local channels turn into a dealbreaker once football season rolls back around in the fall.