Does the Sling Freestream interface deliver a good experience?
Does the Sling Freestream interface deliver a good experience?
Using Sling Freestream won’t cost you any money, but is the service’s interface intuitive and easy to use?
Sling Freestream isn’t the same experience you get with Sling TV to be sure, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sling Freestream comes with a host of programming all its own, including free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels in the hundreds, and thousands of hours of on-demand programming you can watch at no cost as well.
For all that, however, free streaming services like Sling Freestream can often skimp on things like their user interfaces. How does Sling Freestream fare in this regard? I took a deep dive into the streamer’s user experience, and I’ve got plenty to say on the platform right here.
How does the Sling Freestream user interface score?
How good is the Sling Freestream user interface?
There’s a giant red flag to send up about Sling Freestream’s interface right away when you log into your account: the absence of a Continue Watching row. So confused was I about the seeming lack of such an option that I logged into the Sling app on two different smart TVs, and only on the second did I discover that I had to scroll down a total of 12 rows to find it on the service’s home page.
There are other issues with the Sling Freestream home page that I’m not too keen on either. Let’s start with live content; there’s plenty of it on Sling Freestream, but unfortunately, the service begins autoplaying the channel if you hover over a content tile with your remote cursor for too long. Worse yet, if you still don’t scroll away, that channel just starts autoplaying on your full screen. Some viewers might find it convenient; I find it a hassle.
That’s especially true since clicking the back button to return to the home page keeps the channel you were just watching in an autoplay window at the bottom of the screen, which you have to click back into to close. And Sling TV packs in a ton of content rows on its home page, with nothing more than content that I have to sign up for a paid Sling TV service to watch, which is annoying but probably something I should have expected.
Sling Freestream makes you work a little too hard to close its pop-out window for my taste. Click to expand.
To me, the Sling Freestream home page seems overengineered. I can see why the streamer wanted to add the features it did, and maybe some customers will enjoy the service’s liberal use of autoplay. I’m not among them, however, and I can’t give the service a very high score to start with here.
Home page score: 3 out of 10
Is content discovery easy on Sling Freestream?
The streamer loses more points here for packing its interface with titles that viewers have to pay to watch. Once again, it’s logical that Sling is going for the upsell here, but it objectively makes it harder to determine what to stream on the service for free when wading through row after row of titles that you can only watch with paid Sling packages.
To be fair to Sling Freestream, the service does put its search function conspicuously at the top of the left-hand menu, and mixes live channels that you can watch for free with no-cost on-demand content to help viewers get a better sense of its content on each page. However, the search function is fairly cursory, and there doesn’t seem to be as many resources devoted to organizing the streamer carefully as there are to selling me something.
Content discovery score: 5 out of 10
Can you move between categories easily on Sling Freestream?
With the amount of upselling that Sling Freestream tries to do, I would definitely appreciate having an option to filter and see just shows and movies that are available to watch for free. Sling Freestream doesn’t provide this; its options in the left-hand menu are limited to Search, Home, Guide, DVR, On Demand, and Settings.
I’m happy to say that the live channel guide has plenty of filter options, and doesn’t appear to be backed with channels that are locked unless I pay to unlock them. The On Demand page also doesn’t have any titles I’m forced to pay for, so I suppose there is a way to block out paid-only content on Sling Freestream after all.
Category switching score: 7 out of 10
Does Sling Freestream have good playback controls?
This is one area where I can score Sling Freestream fairly highly. The service comes with closed captions, a button for more information, and tabs for My Channels and More Like This to let viewers jump into something else with ease when watching Sling Freestream.
There are also interactive features that viewers can use by swiping up; you can jump to the channel guide, Sling Freestream games, or to sports scores instantly by scrolling up while watching a title on Sling Freestream, and this makes it much easier to hop around the service if what you’re watching isn’t grabbing you. On TV shows, viewers can pull up the list of available episodes to browse through seasons without having to return to a show’s details page.
Sling Freestream’s playback controls are one of the best aspects of the streamer.
Playback controls score: 8 out of 10
Can you skip opening and closing credits with Sling Freestream?
I tried several different pieces of content on Sling Freestream
Final thoughts
Sling Freestream simply didn’t measure up to expectations in a lot of areas for me. Its playback controls and category switching aspects were fine to good, but it’s hard to get past the low score for the streamer’s home page, which is, after all, the first place that any user interacts with Sling Freestream.
The paid Sling interface probably does a much more intuitive job of laying things out for customers. But if you’re using Sling Freestream, don’t expect to be blown away by how easy to use the interface is; it isn’t terribly, and it gets low marks from me overall.