Sling TV Outage During Final Four Exposes Web Streaming Weakness
Posted in: UncategorizedThe brief weekend outage that prevented some Sling TV subscribers from watching college basketball’s Final Four highlighted the Achilles heel of cable cord-cutting: reliability.
Dish Network’s new online-TV service, which offers about 20 channels for $20 a month, is one of a growing number of web services that offer a few popular channels at a lower price. Such internet-based bundles are giving consumers more options to watch TV without paying for traditional cable packages.
However, these web services rely on a foundation that is more fragile than television. They’re vulnerable to buffering or crashing during traffic spikes caused by popular TV shows or sporting events like the national men’s college basketball tournament. Sling TV, which announced last week it was adding an online version of HBO to its package, will be tested again April 12 during the season premiere of HBO’s hit show “Game of Thrones.”
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