What’s the ad experience like when using Sling Freestream?
What’s the ad experience like when using Sling Freestream?
Sling Freestream is a relatively new streaming service, but it isn’t trying anything too revolutionary with its ad experience.
Sling Freestream is part of a trend that’s sweeping across live TV streaming services these days. The month-to-month contracts available with these services makes them easy to cancel, so their parent companies have created free streamers to help keep former subscribers still engaging with a similarly-branded product, as well as to attract new customers.
If you’re thinking about giving Sling Freestream a try, but are unsure of the ad experience you’ll find on the service, fear not! I’ve tested Sling Freestream personally to see what the ad experience was like, and you can read all about it below.
What’s the ad experience like on Sling Freestream?
How many ads do you see on Sling Freestream TV shows?
As readers may know, I usually like to test original content versus licensed content to see what difference there is in the ad experience between them. But Sling Freestream does not yet make its own original shows and movies, which curtailed my experiment somewhat.
Nevertheless, I tested a half-hour series and an hour-long series as I always do. My half-hour test subject was “Family Feud,” and for my hour-long show, I picked “Shameless.” The length of ad breaks on both types of show with a pre-roll break (usually 30 seconds) and 45-second to one-minute breaks.
The only difference was the number of breaks per episode. During “Family Feud,” I saw three to four breaks per episode, but for “Shameless,” the number rose as high as six breaks. Altogether, I saw around four minutes of commercials per half-hour episode, and around six minutes on the hourlong show.
How many ads do you see on Sling Freestream movies?
I tested two movies for this phase of my Sling Freestream ad deep dive: “Donnie Darko” and “A Walk to Remember.” I didn’t notice a major difference when it came to ad break lengths as compared to TV; both movies featured breaks of 45 to 60 seconds in length.
The number of ad breaks in each movie varied, however. In “Donnie Darko,” I saw 12 ad breaks stretched over the course of the movie, whereas “A Walk to Remember” had only eight. The films are almost the same runtime, so I was hard-pressed to find a reason why there would be so many more in “Donnie Darko.”
Perhaps Sling Freestream simply varies the number of ad breaks per movie at random? Either way, I would say viewers can anticipate around eight to 15 minutes of ads per movie when they watch a film on Sling Freestream.
Does Sling Freestream have pause ads?
Yes, Sling Freestream does offer pause ads when watching on-demand content.
Does Sling Freestream have ads with kids’ content?
I tested several episodes of “We Bare Bears” and “Kid City,” and did not notice any ad breaks while watching either show.
Bottom line
I had what I now consider to be a more or less standard ad experience on Sling Freestream. I thought the frequency of ad breaks was just about right, and the length of the breaks themselves was somewhat shorter than I’ve experienced on other streamers, which was a plus.
The strength of Sling Freestream’s on-demand library is another question, but when it comes to the ad experience itself, I don’t think viewers will see the service remarkably worse than any other when it comes to commercials with on-demand content.
Sling Freestream
Sling Freestream is a free ad-supported TV service offered through Sling TV, offering one of the largest free live TV lineups available today. Viewers get access to more than 520 live channels and over 41,000 on-demand movies and TV episodes without needing a paid subscription. The service blends live news, sports, entertainment, reality TV, movies, and kids’ programming into a single app experience that works across most major streaming devices.