Have a Chromecast? Watch Sling TV for free.

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To celebrate promote the launch of Sling TV on Chromecast, the companies have quite the promotion running. Existing hardware owners are entitled to two free months of the normally $20/month over-the-top television service. Tho Sling TV has occasional streaming issues and a somewhat uncomfortable interface (that’s being improved), nearly a year later, no one else has managed to launch an equivalent nationwide Internet TV service. So why not check it out… for free?

slingtv-chromecast

Try the Best of Live TV for two months free, with Chromecast. See 20+ channels live including ESPN, AMC, HGTV, and more. No annual contract.

21 thoughts on “Have a Chromecast? Watch Sling TV for free.”

  1. I signed up for this promotion about a week ago, and I all I can say is I’m glad it’s free. I had to uninstall the app from my completely stock Nexus 5 because it actually crashed my phone multiple times. The app would continually restart itself in a black screen of death that required rebooting the phone. Even when the app wasn’t crashing my phone, it rarely worked with my Chromecast. I tried watching a couple different games on ESPN, and I never got more than a few minutes of watchable video before it downscaled to 240p, or completely froze. I have a 50mbps connection and regularly stream 1080p from other services so I know bandwidth was not the issue.

    TL;DR The Sling app is buggy, and the stream quality is generally terrible.

  2. I’ve used it several times on Roku and Roku TV, also for free “borrowing” a friend’s press account. When they aren’t being crushed by usage during big events, it’s been pretty decent. ESPN is usually the network to experience issues, when they occur. If Sling could clean up that interface, it’d be a pretty reasonable option for my mom who generally just watches things like Food, HGTV, or CNN in the background.

  3. This is not going to get me to open the closet door that’s four feet away and look for my ChromeCast. Sling got me through two months of living in a TV-less spare bedroom at my in-laws after we sold our house but waited to close on our new one. But just barely. Just not impressed with the single stream, poor interface, sluggish to start streaming, hit-or-miss on demand content, small selection of channels, etc.

    Same way I ultimately wasn’t impressed with the needs a remote like Roku managed to bundle with their dirt cheap stick Chromecast that works great unless you have your phone on the other side of the room charging and don’t feel like using a tablet to change “channels”.

    I’m reasonably happy with the Fire TV stick I travel with because it can logon to Hotel WiFi. I’ll probably invest in the new one because it’s faster I believe. And I’m in love with the new Apple TV. Everything else is making me yawn these days.

  4. Tried Sling TV 7 day trial this week. I don’t have any device that allows SlingTV to play on my TV in my greatroom so I tried using it on my Window PC. I was about to cancel my subscription when someone on a public thread told me that the Windows app was a piece of junk and needed to be scrapped. So I tried it on my Kindle Fire tablet and it seemed to work pretty well with a few hiccups watching ESPN last Saturday during the Ark-LSU game. I’ve done ahead and cancelled my subscription today until I get a device that supports it. A Fire TV, perhaps?

  5. Oh, I’m mostly interested in the Sling TV Sports package as it contains the SEC Network. However, the football season is almost over so I’m not in a rush to subscribe now anyway.

  6. Interesting remarks by Charle Ergen on last Quartler Conference call earlier this month:
    He concedes stumbles with SlingTV and asserts new services will experience the same stumbles, but Sling is learning. Among things he says Sling is working to improve are poor quality streams, especially for ESPN, better interface that he says was OK when they had a few channels but is not inadequate for the new numbers of channels. Further, when asked other things missing on Sling, Charlie did say they are working on multiple-streams (sounds like an issue of money to program providers), more “look-backs”, more VOD, and even DVR capabilities. Obviously some of those changes will come sooner than others.

    In short, I think the key think here is that we have a Chairman/CEO who has heard and is aware of Sling’s weaknesses and what subscribers want, even to the point of saying even he does NOT like the current interface and thinks it too cumbersome, and he and management seem actively attempting to improve service. I hope as time passes we can look back on SlingTV as having had beginning stumbles and really be more of what the consumer wants and needs, especially at the sweet price-point of $20 per month to start because while the coming competition is said to be coming with a few features SlingTV today lacks, they are all also hinted they will have a $50 per month price point, to START. That is almost as much as what current cable and sat subs pay today, and that is BAAAAADDDD for consumer and cheapskate cord-cutters.

  7. Ergen in the weeds and with those comments makes me feel hopeful. Especially since my second Roku TV arrived today. That’s FOUR between Mom and I!

  11. So, I keep getting these ‘viral’ twits, where every week or so, a twit gets reprinted by some high influence person.

    And it’s great! Ten thousand impressions! Beats the hell out of the other option!

    (And genuinely, what I care about isn’t the impression number. It’s that other high influence folks read the high influence folks’ streams. Those are the readers to target for my #brand. Those are the fish to my lamprey.)

    But truly, I hate it. The twit-thing is like a pinball machine. (Yeah. Fine. Go ahead and substitute ‘video game’. I roll classic.) And the ‘viral’ twits throw my scoreboard off whack. I can’t look at the month, and see what I really scored in the game, and what is ‘viral’ artifice.

    I mean, I know if I throw a clever, on-point twit to a medium influence guy who is familiar with me, I’ll score near a thousand impressions. That’s the game. The ‘viral’ hits are some gimmicky bonus that make the game meaningless.

    * But again, I do prefer it to the alternative. All praise to Vishnu! I get familiar with more medium/high influence folks so I’ll be able to post higher non-gimmicky scores in the future. Just pisses me off in the present; I want my quarter back.

  13. “But I’m wondering – is this the page you’re looking at?”

    Yuperoo.

    I ain’t givin’ them no CC#. But you’re saying if I did, I’d get something more interesting?

    (If something like Bitcoin were a real thing, rather than some weird ether, I’d actually promote a few funny/sarcastic/proto-viral twits for sh*ts & giggles. But the minor benefit is not worth the anti-pseudonym linking to me.)

    And tell me with a straight face that it’s not a video game.

  14. I dunno, I haven’t messed much with it. But that’s what I suspect. Do your listings show ‘mobile footprint’? Like on mine, I see 42% of mobile is AT&T.

    As far as being a game… well, I guess each one of us has a different objective and pace. Like Myst? I find the engagement rate depressingly low, especially when it comes to exploring links.

  15. “Do your listings show ‘mobile footprint’?”

    Yup. And those general ‘audience’ metrics too.

    “I dunno, I haven’t messed much with it. But that’s what I suspect.”

    If you’ve given them a CC# at all, you might be getting more info. At least that’s what I thought you were suggesting. (I do know the real benefit of ‘verified’ is that you get crazy good analytics. There’s a public support doc on it, and IIRC, I think you can actually see the individuals impressing/interacting with you.)

    “I find the engagement rate depressingly low, especially when it comes to exploring links.”

    Yuperoo. ‘Link clicks’ are a bust in the medium. Gotta screenshot pullquotes. Which is a shame, cuz I’d both rather folks read the full piece, and rather send the originator the traffic.

    ‘Profile clicks’ are my key metric, both cuz I don’t go after followers, and cuz I want to see what gets folks interested in my gestalt viewpoint.

    (The only way I can make sense of my normally high numbers for no-@ twits, given my low follower number, is that I’ve got previously captured folks who’ve bookmarked my individual feed, and check in.)

  17. FWIW, I hit link clicks all the time. That’s most of the value I get out of being a twit reader. But since I use teh twits “wrong”, I’m doing it not-logged-in, and sans-JS, so the person never knows I’m actually reading their suggestion…

  18. Yeah, they have my credit card number. But it sounds like our analytics might be the same. I’ve also read “verified” accounts have all sorts of super powers, but I’m not the real Dave Zatz. Twitter was wise to verify so many in media as a form of buttering them up, but I don’t have an org behind me and when I did have an in, well I think my public Android bashing didn’t help my case.

    Will seek out your tweet shortly. If my attention span allows it.

  20. “Read it. Predictably depressing. She didn’t even have space left to discuss gun violence.”

    As my favorite old-school lefty blogger, Atrios, has as his motto: Sh*t Is F*cked Up And Bullsh*t.

    But to cheer you up, on the bright side, likelihood is that sometime before we die, a new FDR / lefty Reagan will come forward to clean things up. At least if Mad Max-ish civilization breakdown doesn’t happen due to climate change, or Oligarchs don’t push us to actual fascism, or runaway AI doesn’t bring about Skynet, or…

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