Sling TV is perhaps the best live TV service that no one is talking about
Hello there, I’m the guy knitting back together the cord he cut over a year ago, succumbing to my unexpected need for a live TV feed. The good news is that I think I’ve found a service that beats most others, and one that most people don’t talk about: Sling TV.
Cord cutting isn’t new, but the slow return to cable-like services is, especially for me. I cut off my cable TV service over a year ago, and since then I’ve relied on a hodgepodge of the top streaming services, including Disney Plus, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, and Apple TV. Almost all of them have become more expensive, while the number of advertisements has also increased. I now pay more for less.
Other than Paramount Plus, none of these platforms offer a collection of live, local broadcast and cable networks. This hasn’t really mattered to me except during live events like the Oscars, Emmys, and most recently the MLB Playoffs.
You could say this is all the Mets’ fault. I’ve been a lifelong fan and I didn’t want to miss the team’s stunning playoff run. We all know how it ended, with the Dodgers knocking out my beloved Mets and then beating the Yankees in the World Series for good measure. But let’s not dwell on baseball.
Play ball
Desperate to see the Mets play the Brewers for the first time in a Wildcard series, I started looking for livestream game options. Did you know that there are countless TikTokers who game the system by splitting their feed between an illegal live broadcast of games and their own on-air commentary? It’s not a great viewing experience, and neither is the video of TikTokers recreating real gameplay in one of the MLB console games.
Most live TV bundles like YouTube will set you back $70 or more. That was a lot to pay for what might have been a few baseball games, and a little too close to what I paid for cable.
Then I came across Sling TV. The DishTV subsidiary isn’t often mentioned alongside YouTube TV and Fubo, but has many of the same features and, as it turned out, Fox Sports 1 (FS1) broadcast all the games. In the voluminous Guide, I also noticed that most, but not all, local TV stations were available at the blue tier of $45 per month. There was no CBS New York, but that was the only network I could stream live on Paramount Plus.
Sling TV also has cable-like DVR capabilities (just like YouTube TV, and recording is unlimited unlike Sling’s 50-hour limit for my level), which meant I could record and pause live TV just like I was used to with my old cable service. Oh, the joy of not having to struggle to stay up to watch Saturday Night Live or suffer through the commercial-filled viewing of Peacock the next day. Now I pick up, watch and scroll through the ads. I feel liberated.
As with other services, there are countless channels and content that I will probably never watch on Sling TV. I’m not even really a sports guy, which is one of the reasons I got tired of paying cable for all the ESPN channels I never watched. My plan was to use Sling TV during the playoffs and then cancel (hear the foreshadowing?).
Look everywhere
My favorite feature, however, turned out to be the mobile app. I ended up using this to watch playoff games on my iPhone 16 Pro Max while I was out to dinner. I had the sound turned off, but a couple next to us noticed I was streaming the game and called it “excellent” (my wife was not happy). Even at the beginning of a concert I left the muted playing going. Later I watched matches on the train. And while on vacation in Florida at a friend’s house who also didn’t have cable, we mirrored the Sling TV MLB playoff feed from my iPad to an LG TV. It looked great.
When the Mets fell, I prepared to cancel my SlingTV subscription. I was worried that the price would suddenly increase after this trial period, and I was also confident that we wouldn’t use it for anything else.
Of course I was wrong.
Sling TV reintroduced us to our morning TV favorites that we loved having on in the background, like The Today Show and Live with Kelly and Mark. We started taping some other shows – and then had our first conversation about maybe not canceling them.
After all, Sling TV is cheaper than the competition, and we enjoyed all those live channels, as well as some of the cable channels I had missed, like FX, AMC, and Comedy Central. Look, I know cable TV is dying, but there’s still a lot of great content on it that, if I’m honest with myself, I still enjoy.
On the other hand, we now pay $45 a month for what is essentially a cable TV service. Our new conversations are about consolidation. Do we really need the now more expensive Apple TV+? What about Hulu, which keeps changing and is now hidden under our Disney Plus subscription? What about Max? Are we even looking? House of the Dragon more?
I don’t know if we can give up on these streamers, but I also realize that we may now be addicted to a cable-like experience again. At least Sling TV does it well, and at a relatively reasonable price. So there’s that.