I had meant to post my review of Sling TV on Amiko A3 here last night. Unfortunately I got a bit busy. During the third quarter of the game the factory skyped wanting to help me with an A3 project. I guess they weren't watching the superbowl.
Anyway here is my rather long winded testing and review. If you can read the entire novel it probably answers most any question about how the service works on A3.
Sling TV on Amiko A3 Review
Summary
Good: $20 price, good picture quality, no contracts, multiple devices and it works.
Bad: not flawless, cumbersome GUI.
Bottom line: Worth the $20 for premium live streaming content on A3 if you like the channel lineup.
Testing and comparison setups
-Amiko A3 Production Sample, 2.0.70-ALPHA ROM, wired/wireless.
-Amiko A3 (stock), NA ROM40D-2.0.61, wired.
-OnePlus One Phone, Cyanogenmod 11S
-Sling Android App 4.0.3.137
-Comcast Business Internet, 50/10.
-AT&T 4G.
-Comcast Xfinity TV running on A3.
-47” Philips LCD 1080p 120Hz
-32” Insignia LED cheapie 60Hz
I am going to skip the fine details of the Sling TV service. There are more than enough posts, articles and early reviews that get into this. My main focus is Sling TV as a cheap way for True FTA Amiko A3 owners to get some premium live content on their STB’s.
Here is what is available as of 1 February 2015:
Best of TV ($20/month)
ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, Travel Channel, CNN, ABC Family, Disney Channel, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim
News and Info Extra (+$5/month)
Cooking Channel, DIY Network, HLN, and Bloomberg News
Kids Extra (+$5/month)
Disney Junior, Disney XD, Boomerang, BabyTV, and ducktv
For testing here I went with the Best of TV (core package) and the News and Info Extra. Sling TV is currently still in the invite only stage and has a free 7 day trial which includes the add on package I chose. They apparently don’t have the online management part of their site up yet. I had to call to sign up. Much to my shock (especially for a DISH Network company) the phone was answered right away by a live person, an American. No India call center that DISH is infamous for. The whole process took around 15 minutes. I did let the rep do some explaining so I could hear the whole sales pitch. There was no pressure to add anything but I chose the News and Info Extra for testing purposes. I received 2 emails and the rep stayed on the phone to ensure I received them. One was a welcome email with the links to download the apps. The other was from DISH World (DISH Satellite) with instructions to reset my password. Sling apparently does not have their own user management yet so they are using the DISH setup for user/password access.
Once Sling TV is fully rolled out the signup and management will be online and I’d assume the App will be in Google Play. I had to download it from a link and sideload on my devices. Very easy especially with FTP on all my Droids, but Play Store is easier. I’ll get the Sling App into A3 F-droid Appstore next time I update it so A3 owners won’t have to sideload.
After the quick install I launched the Sling App, entered my info from DISH World and was watching live ESPN in seconds. Nothing hard or complicated at all.
The first thing I noticed was the surprisingly good picture quality. On any TV bigger than 40” you really notice the quality (or lack of) in streams and media. Sling TV isn’t just “watchable”, it is good. I also have Comcast/Xfinity Digital on the A3 for comparison. The Xfinity SD channels typically run around 3Mbps and look decent. Sling TV looks better. Last night I compared Sling’s TBS against Xfinity TBS HD. In that case there was no comparison, the Xfinity HD is very noticeably superior to Sling. It also isn’t a fair comparison as Sling is not advertised as HD and it is a fraction of the price of Xfinity.
One thing I noticed on both A3’s is sometimes the video motion seems “unnatural” for short periods. I don’t know how else to describe it. There are no interlace lines, it doesn’t stutter and audio sync is perfect. It doesn’t seem to be just with high motion scenes or anything that falls under a typical video issue. Whatever it is, it isn’t a dealbreaker. After watching for awhile you tune it out. Unlike many video issues on other platforms this is still totally watchable. I didn’t really see this on the OnePlus One but I haven’t been watching Sling nearly as much on it.
On to the App itself. It works, but I personally don’t care for the layout and GUI for navigation and EPG. I’d prefer a traditional EPG list type layout. Sling TV has a popup horizontal scroll thingy with icons that you flip through side to side. It isn’t the worst thing in the world on A3 but on the phone it blocks out nearly the whole picture. Again it is not a dealbreaker by any means, just something I don’t care for. I’d assume the App will be improved and change over time so I’m sure the GUI interaction will be refined in the future.
Some of the channels have timeshifting and the ability to pause. You’ll see a time bar at the bottom when you launch a channel. If it is something you can timeshift you just air mouse and drag where you want to be or click the pause or whatever. On launching a channel/program some will give you the option to start the show from the beginning or watch it live or “resume” from where you were. This seems to work decent going from watching on TV, moving to the phone for awhile, then back to the TV.
This does bring up a service limitation: you can put Sling TV on 100 devices but you can only watch one at a time. I tried this out by launching on my phone while the A3 was playing. In about a minute the A3 stopped and popped up a message about stopping because I was watching on another device. Most guys have 1 A3 so this is not a big deal, but it definitely won’t work in a 4 STB house with kids and everyone trying to watch at once. You also aren’t going to be sharing your account with friends and family like Netflix because of the one device at a time limitation.
Sling TV is using a very nice adaptive bitrate system. I don’t see it on the A3’s since they are in a fixed spot with virtually unlimited bandwidth but on the phone it will change rates when I wonder toward the fringe of my 5.8GHz WiFi coverage. I’ve seen it drop as low as 300Kbps (with noticeably crap picture) but it doesn’t stop, stutter or go out of sync. Same with when the datarate goes back up. It has good picture quality as low as 800Kbps so I’d say the service is watchable even on crappy 1Mbps DSL. It works fine on my AT&T 4G although it takes noticeably longer to load, buffer and get to the higher quality datarates.
The Sling App runs different on phone (Android 4.42) than on the A3’s which are 4.2.2. The A3’s don’t seem to have the option to get into settings to limit bandwidth or show the current bandwidth. By default the App is running unlimited/variable so that is ok. It will adjust to your available bandwidth and network connection. On the phone I haven’t seen it report higher than 1.6Mbps. Given the speed of my ISP and network it could run 20x this. I am thinking the datarate reporting just doesn’t work right in the app or they are using super efficient H264. In any case it looks and works good. The A3’s seem to always be running good picture quality and don’t shift datarates that I can see with the setup here so I guess it doesn’t matter.
I did find a couple hiccups with the service itself. Not dealbreakers and I think isolated incidents. Last night cooking channel audio was out of sync for at least a couple hour. The problem wasn’t my devices, it was the same on the A3’s and the OnePlus One. Start/stop/relaunch did not fix. I think they had an issue related to that channel and/or the timeshift encoding for the shows that were playing. This morning all is fine with it. The other issue I saw a couple times was incurred “now” EPG. One was a different show entirely, the other listed the wrong episode of a show. This type of thing happens all the time with EPG data whether it is on DISH satellite, Comcast, TitanTV or wherever. Not unexpected and really has nothing to do with the service itself.
Overall I think this is a great service for True FTA guys with A3’s. Decent live and legal content, cheap. Sure, it isn’t perfect but no device or service is. If you and/or the wife are looking for the content/channels Sling offers, get the service. You aren’t going to get live and legal premium channels any other way unless you want to do the cable/satellite subscription/contract route for big bucks. This only runs $20 to try out and you can ditch it at anytime if you don’t like it or go back to it only in months when shows you want to watch are in season. I’m thinking many A3 guys will get and keep this.
The only reason I am not going to keep it myself long term is that I have a “sweetheart” deal with Comcast. I get a good digital package with HD for free and I get it on my A3’s. If I didn’t have that I’d keep Sling TV for sure. For now I’ll continue to run and test Sling for the A3’s to make sure all stays well with it.
