Sling TV is Growing, But It Needs to Do This to Truly Take Off

Sling TV, Dish Network's streaming video service that offers an array of channels like ESPN and Food Network for $20 per month, now has an estimated 394,000 subscribers. Dish described those numbers on Monday as being "in line with expectations." But if there's one piece of advice I can give to Dish to help Sling TV exceed expectations, it's this: fix the streaming video quality.

I first subscribed to Sling TV in May, mainly so I could watch FC Barcelona on BeIn Sports, the cable channel that airs Spain's La Liga in the US. I figured I'd be more than happy to pay $20 per month to watch Messi, Neymar, and Suarez wreck the league, week in, week out. Having access to other channels like Food Network and HGTV would also let me watch episode after episode of shows like Guy's Grocery Games and House Hunters with my better half.

And that would be great, if the streaming video quality wasn't frequently so disappointing.

Too often does watching the BeIn Sports stream remind me of my college days, trolling through weird message boards (this was pre-Reddit) to find illegal Russian-language streams. The picture looks sub-HD, with muddy colors that smear across my TV. I sit there and watch because I need to, but you're not going to grow your audience on the back of such an inferior experience.

That's assuming the channel even loads, which isn't always the case. It's not uncommon for channels to take upwards of 30 seconds to load upon selecting them. Sometimes, you'll have clicked "OK" on Food Network, and a empty black screen will sit there until you scroll to a different channel and then return. How is this better than regular TV?

Sometimes, it works fine. But then you run into nonsense. Who has time for that? Not me!

Cable TV may be a questionable value, but there's no waiting for the latest episode of Chopped to eventually load. And I say this as someone who regularly streams a wide variety of services flawlessly, from mainstream content like Netflix to niche nonsense like New Japan Pro-Wrestling, which streams to my apartment in New York from the other side of the planet without issue.

These are common complaints online. One Reddit user recently asked the Sling TV subreddit whether or not the service was "non-functional for anyone else right now." "Voting with wallet," the Redditor then added, Others have complained about other foibles like commercials whose volume is twice as loud as the actual show they're watching (be sure to keep the volume button handy). Accessing on-demand content is also a chore, requiring users of the Roku app to click the main "OK" button once, then hit up, then hit down, and the scroll to the right to select your show.

These are all issues that militant cord cutters may have no problem putting up with if it means flipping Big Cable the bird, but in order to grow beyond this base, the company needs to figure the basics. Using Sling TV should not feel like an advertisement for cable, which is a feeling I have more often than not.