Universal Sports on Sling TV

Universal Sports, part of Sling TV’s optional Sports Extra

I’ve had a few weeks to play with Sling TV, the new streaming service from Dish Network, not to be confused with the Slingbox hardware device of the same name. Sling TV, the Best in Show winner at the International CES 2015, has been touted as the answer for cord-cutters who still want ESPN and a few other pay-TV channels. It might be exactly that, but for me, I don’t know whether it’s worth the $20 or more monthly subscription fee.

First, the good news. Sling TV performed flawlessly every time I used it. That’s not very surprising since it’s based on the mature streaming technology of DishWorld, which has been running since 2012. (DishWorld will soon change its name to Sling International, but I digress.) Through announcements with AMC and Epix, Dish has indicated that it will add programming to Sling TV’s already decent lineup. As with DishWorld, Sling TV is already available on Roku, iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, and Sling TV is also promoting its new Amazon Fire TV app. The same pay-per-view movies are listed on Sling TV as DishWorld, including (surprisingly) free Bollywood movies.

One improvement that Sling TV offers over DishWorld is an intermediate viewing Window in its Windows app. The DishWorld app’s only options are a small monitor area in its menu window (see below) or full screen. The really big advantage is ESPN; for most households, Sling TV is the least expensive option for watching ESPN.

In fact, Sling TV only really suffers in comparison with other viewing options. Its worst problem is its lack of DVR; most Sling TV channels don’t even include the “last week on-demand” option present with every DishWorld channel. So I can watch ESPN or TBS live, but I can’t pause the stream, record it, or watch shows from earlier today. That’s standard behavior for watching TV in a hotel room, but most of us viewers have recorders, and we’re pretty used to them. (My family refers to live, unpauseable TV as “hotel mode” TV. But I digress again.)

Universal Sports on DishWorld

Universal Sports on DishWorld

DishWorld recently began offering a Sports TV package with 21 channels for a measly $10 a month. That includes Universal Sports and beIN Sports, both part of Sling TV’s Sports Extra package, plus One World Sports, Willow Cricket, Trace Sport Stars, beIN Sports en Español, Nautical Channel, and 14 non-sports channels, including personal favorites FashionTV, Baby TV and more. If you want Sling TV for Monday Night Football, then DishWorld can’t help you. But if you just want to watch something and you’ve got an open mind, it’s a pretty good deal. I sometimes watch 21st-century Doctor Who episodes on demand from Ebru TV, and I’ll tune in to DishWorld’s news channels for a different perspective on events.

Here’s a chunk of perspective that you won’t find anywhere else: Sling TV isn’t as good as NimbleTV was before it had to shut down. By working as a streaming adjunct to a separate Dish subscription, NimbleTV provided more channels and a full DVR. NimbleTV’s iOS app was as good as Sling TV’s, and NimbleTV was working on adding other platforms. Its tier with ESPN cost a whole lot more than Sling TV, so I’d like to have seen those two products compete in the marketplace – the inexpensive, well-promoted Sling TV and the little-known, pricey NimbleTV.

Another option is to effectively host your own NimbleTV – spring for a full Dish Network subscription at home, then use Dish Anywhere apps for streaming on the go. If you can mount a dish and don’t mind spending over $70 per month, that provides a lot of advantages over Sling TV. But I think I’m still sidestepping the point: If you’re a cord-cutter who really wants to watch ESPN and can handle it live-only, Sling TV is your solution. For the rest of us, I’m not so sure Sling TV is worth buying.

c DepositPhotos / scyther5

© Depositphotos.com / scyther5

The last couple of weeks, a few TV trade magazines have been abuzz about something that’s old news to us free-TV enthusiasts: There are a growing number of digital subchannels available in markets all over the country. For over-the-air TV viewers, it’s like having a virtual pay-TV system except without the paying. The most remarkable thing about this burgeoning free entertainment menu is that few people seem to know about it.

A side note: What’s the best name for these digital TV subchannels? Michael Malone tackled that question in Broadcasting & Cable. “The channels are alternately referred to as diginets or multicast nets or dot-two channels or subchannels, creating confusion among viewers, and even industry types,” he wrote. Katz Broadcasting promotes the term “emerging broadcast networks,” but I think that’s an unwieldy mess. Headline writers seem to prefer “diginets,” but I like “dot-twos” because it describes how to find these networks, even those that are really at dot-three or dot-seven.

I’ve been watching dot-twos since The Tube and Universal Sports were on. (The Tube faded to black in 2007 and Universal Sports shifted to pay-TV distribution in 2012.) This happy by-product of the digital TV conversion has exploded since then. Of the 70 channels I can pick up here in Denver, 42 are dot-twos, and they include channels devoted to movies, classic TV, news and weather. Sure they also include a solid chunk of stuff I can do without – religion, shopping, and Spanish-language programming – but it’s nice to have something for everybody.

What hasn’t changed since the dot-twos’ early days is that few viewers are aware of them. (I couldn’t find any dot-two surveys, but almost no one I talk to knows about them.) You might say that you can’t pay for this stuff; only a handful of dot-twos are on cable systems, and none are on Dish Network or DirecTV. The only way to watch is over the air, which is great for cord-cutters and a little inconvenient for everyone else.

So why not put together some advertising to let viewers know what they might be missing? This could be a great way for broadcasters as a group to boast about another facet of their public service. At a time when it’s hard to find a movie on the major broadcast TV channels, wouldn’t it be a good idea to mention that there are over 100 movies available every week on these dot-twos? As wireless companies clamor for TV’s bandwidth, wouldn’t it be smart to show America that it’s already being put to good use?

Rooftop TV antennas

The Cable Cutter antenna on my roof, with the Radio Shack yagi that it vanquished.

There’s been a major change at FTABlog World Headquarters in Denver. My decade-old yagi-style antenna (I always call it the old-school, pointy kind of antenna), featured in my brief burst of international almost-celebrity, finally met its match. It was defeated by HD Frequency’s Cable Cutter antenna, which now provides a wider selection of over-the-air TV channels to my OTA device test bed.

That yagi had a lot of history behind it. I bought it from Radio Shack way back in 2004 when Dish Network had its first major retransmission tussle with CBS. Since then, it survived a new roof and a growing list of new OTA antennas. Some of the contenders came close to the yagi’s performance, but none ever beat it.

One major factor in the yagi’s longevity was its emphasis on VHF signals. With the switch to HD, most stations moved to UHF, but two Denver channels stayed on the VHF band. The most magnificent, impressive UHF antenna isn’t any good to me if it can’t somehow deliver my ABC and NBC affiliates.

Then at the International CES last month, Theodore Head, CEO of SiliconDust, maker of the amazingly useful HDHomeRun tuners, told me about HD Frequency’s antennas. Head said that they were simply the best, and he referred me to HD Frequency founder Josh McDonnell, who sent along his top-of-the-line Cable Cutter for me to test.

One of the really nice things about the HDHomeRun is the number of tools available for it, both in-house and third-party. To measure the signal quality for various channels, I started out with Signal GH for iOS, but later switched to HDhomerun (sic) Signal Meter for Android. The Android app was a little easier for me to read, and it’s free. I’d recommend the Signal Meter app to help point or position an OTA antenna, but your mobile device OS will probably determine which one is better for you.

The great thing about either signal measurement app is that it provides a good, solid number for signal quality, which makes it a lot easier to compare one antenna to another. When I got my Cable Cutter last week, the first thing I tried was sticking it in my ground-floor window. I was amazed to see that from there it matched or beat my yagi’s numbers for every channel except that VHF pair, which were weak but usable. I could recommend the Cable Cuter right there as an excellent indoor antenna, but when I later moved it to the roof, it kept its strong UHF signal and matched my yagi’s VHF reception.

(I’ve got a whole page full of numbers for all of the channels and all of the antenna position experiments I tried, but I’ll spare you the details. I’ll only mention one fact, verified during this process: Signal quality can change from minute to minute even when everything else stays the same. It takes more than one pair of readings to verify that Antenna A picks up a channel better than Antenna B.)

One more disadvantage of the yagi is that it’s very directional. Most of the channels in Denver come from Lookout Mountain, about 12 miles east of downtown, so that’s where the yagi pointed. There are a couple of other channel clusters that are broadcast from a point over 20 miles north of downtown. From my roof, those two towers are about 80 degrees apart, and my carefully aimed Cable Cutter can just see them both.

Thanks to the Cable Cutter, for the first time I can actually receive all the channels that TVFool.com says I ought to be able to get. For anyone who needs an OTA antenna, I can’t imagine a better choice.

Left to right: Kris Alexander, Akamai; Jeff Binder, Layer3 TV; and Michael Goodman, Strategy Analytics, three of the panelists at an Internet TV conference session at CES.

Left to right: Kris Alexander, Akamai; Jeff Binder, Layer3 TV; and Michael Goodman, Strategy Analytics, three of the panelists at an Internet TV conference session at CES.

I promised myself that this year, at the International CES, I wouldn’t take photos of the zillion iPhone cases on display. If you wanted to see that, you’ll just have to content yourself with last year’s set. Instead, I’ll close the book on CES 2015 with truly useful insight.

Not my insight, of course. In this case, it came from a conference session called “InternetTV – The Disruption – Skinny TV – Mega Premium”. CES has plenty of conference tracks, but in general I find that the speakers at conference sessions either tell me what I already know or merely promote their companies’ initiatives, usually just new products or services. But this session ran before the show floor opened and at the same time as the opening keynote address. Unfortunately, I’ve never encountered a newsworthy CES keynote.

This conference session was better than most. The panelists discussed changing consumer behavior both caused by and driving internet-based TV viewing, especially as it related to the pay-TV bundle. Downplaying reports of widespread cord-cutting, Michael Goodman, Director of Digital Media for Strategy Analytics, said that millennials have always watched less TV and were less likely to subscribe to pay TV.  In support of pay-TV bundles, Jeff Binder, CEO of Layer3 TV, said, “I think that consumers have not changed a whole lot. Each household has different constituents that watch different channels.” That echoed an earlier statement by TiVo’s Evan Young, who said, “Consumers are not monolithic. It’s different if you’re single.”

Later, the panelists discussed the economics of multi-channel TV, largely agreeing the the content owners ultimately, albeit indirectly, set the price to consumers. Goodman saw that, for example, Netflix’s low-cost contracts with content owners would all eventually require renewal and renegotiation. “Netflix is not going to cost $9-10 (per month) a year from now,” he said. “It’ll be $20 or $30.”

It was all surprisingly meaty, interesting discussion about the always unknowable future, with equal doses of inevitable change and unyielding status quo. But it was Kris Alexander, Chief Strategist at Akamai, who distilled the future of TV into one sentence. When it comes to competing TV systems, Alexander said, discovery and curation are critical.

That was a great thought to keep in my head for the rest of the show. When Tablo, Channel Master, TiVo and even SiliconDust were showing off their latest, they all were looking to offer new channels and suggestions to the viewer. When I would mention those two keys to the TV future, exhibitors would pause, then nod in appreciation for that clear vision.

As we move toward free TV (as in free speech, not free beer) where every viewer can choose what to watch and when to watch it, the winning viewing platform will be the one with the easiest interface and the best suggestions. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out on top.