Sling TV has a reputation for poor performance during major events like the season premiere of the Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, but they may have overcome these issues. Now it seems that Sling TV stood up well under the pressure of the College Football National Championship and did even better than WatchESPN.
When we talked with Sling TV about last nights big game they said “We set a new record last night for the number of simultaneous Sling TV users. Our teams have been working diligently to continually improve our service performance and to scale for big events like last night’s game.”
Here are a few comments from our readers:
Mark Agnew: “Changing between WatchESPN and ESPN on Sling on my Roku 3, I had no buffering issues with Sling but did encounter several ‘error codes’ and no loads with the WatchESPN channel. Also, as has been my previous experience when comparing the two, the Sling ESPN gives me a flawless hi-def picture while the WatchESPN channel looks like I’m watching a movie of the game instead of a live event.”
Justin Kearns: “Working fine here on Roku stick. Sling has been really rock solid as of late.”
We did receive several complaints that WatchESPN was having buffering issues throughout the game.
Eric Holstein: “I just tuned in at 10:35pm CDT in WatchESPN. Got buffering during the commercial break after Alabama scored with 9:45 left in Q4.”
We had two copies of the game running: one was WatchESPN on the Roku 4 using Ethernet plugged in to a 70 Mbps down. The WatchESPN Channel often had issues with buffering and sound sync. We also ran the Sling TV app on a $49 Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, and it performed flawlessly.
It seems that for the most part Sling TV is able to hold up well to the onslaught that comes from major events. I used Sling TV for college football this year and was impressed with the performance. Although I mostly used the WatchESPN app I did use the Sling TV app often and had zero issues.
So how was your experience? Any issues? How has Sling TV been for you over the last month or two?
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