After thinking about it for the better part of a decade, my dad finally bit the bullet and dropped Spectrum cable this summer. What pushed him over the edge was being sold on T-Mobile Home Internet to supplement his T-Mobile cell plan, even though his T-Mobile cell signal isn’t particularly reliable in our apartment. (It works well enough that we don’t have any real problems with the Home Internet service dropping out even though we have the router on a ledge a decent distance away from any windows or doors.) Frontier fiber was also an option and one we considered last year, and probably would bring better, more reliable speeds, but I think he didn’t want the rigamarole of installing all the stuff that would entail compared to plugging in one router. But while Frontier offers a bundle with YouTube TV, T-Mobile has no such thing, and instead offers a plan that comes with subscriptions to the with-ads plans of Hulu and Paramount+; I don’t know if that can defray the cost of a more expensive plan, but if it does then it’s Hulu+Live TV, normally comparably priced to YouTube TV, that benefits from a T-Mobile Home Internet plan. Nonetheless, my dad signed up for YouTube TV and I didn’t object, and we didn’t have any reason to ditch it once the free trial ran out.
This despite the fact that we found YouTube TV’s interface overrated. By reputation, YouTube TV has the best interface and experience of any streaming TV provider, but coming to it from cable was not a smooth transition. This is especially the case early on when the algorithm hasn’t figured out which shows and channels you actually like and half the suggestions that show up are things you don’t care about. Leave that aside, and some of the quirks can’t be helped given the limitations of most streaming device remotes; on the Roku remote, a streaming service has a directional pad, an OK button, and a Back⬅️ button to work with, and if you’re lucky can find creative things to do with the DVR controls. So it’s unsurprising that there isn’t a one-button way to “channel surf” like there was on cable, or a number pad to pull up a specific channel instantly; that does mean that, if the channel you’re looking for is deep enough in the guide and the program you’re looking for doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions at the top of the Home or Live screens, you’re in for a lot of scrolling, but you can reorder the channel lineup to put the channels you actually watch at the top and mitigate that.
Nonetheless, there isn’t an easy way to pull up a description of the program you’re currently watching, and it’s even harder to pull up full descriptions of shows if the space on the Live (Guide) view isn’t sufficient; even for future shows hitting OK will generally pull up info on the show as a whole, not the specific episode or event in that time slot. If you want to scroll the guide more than a day into the future, there’s no way to advance the guide a day at a time like there is on a cable remote; the Rewind⏪ and Fast Forward⏩ buttons on the Roku remote do nothing on the guide, which seems like a missed opportunity. And while it at least used to be possible to put up the full-screen view and continue the program you were watching in the background, at some point in the last few months that stopped being the case, with the current program shutting off if you hit the Back button with no way I can tell to avoid it, which also means returning to the current program isn’t as simple as pressing Up until you’re above the menu bar.
To some degree, this is all stuff that just took some getting used to. For the most part, me and Dad have reached the point of handling the YouTube TV interface fairly smoothly. But all the talk of YouTube TV having the gold standard interface of streaming TV providers seems overblown; there are definitely some places where I could make improvements. And most other streaming TV providers have reached parity on the more concrete features where YouTube has historically stood out; Sling is the only major streaming TV provider that doesn’t offer unlimited DVR for no extra charge, for example. Multiview is now the feature where YouTube TV stands out the most, but it’s not such an overwhelming advantage that people are likely to look past more concrete issues for it. At the least, it doesn’t seem like YouTube TV’s interface and general experience is such an overwhelming advantage that no one can take a bite out of it, that the lack of, say, MLB Network shouldn’t drive people who would otherwise watch it away because the interface is so amazing.
And yet, it is. So much so that it may be leading Disney, for the first time ever, to be losing a carriage dispute. And it might say a lot more about other streaming TV providers than YouTube TV.
The ongoing blackout of the Disney networks on YouTube TV recently went through its second weekend. Not too long ago, the thought of the Disney networks being blacked out on any provider for multiple weekends in the middle of football season would have been unthinkable, and Disney being blacked out at all, by anyone, was unheard of. Just two years ago, Charter Spectrum’s blackout of the Disney networks for ten days seemed unprecedented, even though that dispute ended before affecting any NFL games; this one plowed through not only an NFL game, but one involving the vaunted Cowboys, that no one anywhere in the country could see on YouTube TV despite airing on ABC, and continued unabated. (DirecTV had a Disney dispute that ate through an NFL game last year, but they didn’t lose a second as happened on Monday.) Charter initially seemed to win their dispute, dropping the vast majority of non-ESPN networks Disney offered, which seemed to provide a path forward for the industry, but it ended up being something of a Pyrrhic victory; no other programmer saw their networks dropped after striking deals with Charter or other distributors, and Charter eventually added back the Disney networks it had dropped earlier this year. DirecTV won a perhaps more meaningful victory, the right to carve up Disney channels and offer them in specific themed genre packs, allowing people to get Disney Channel without ESPN and vice versa, but that may have represented Disney acceding to the realities of the modern content business as much as anything, especially with its direct-to-consumer service launching earlier this year.
YouTube TV could well end up with a similar fate, but while distributors have tended to shoulder the bulk of the blame for most carriage disputes, Disney is facing the bulk of the blame for this one despite (or perhaps because of) plastering messages directed at YouTube TV customers in the days leading up to the start of the blackout and continuing on social media afterwards. YouTube TV has become the fourth largest pay TV provider, behind only Charter/Spectrum, Comcast/Xfinity, and DirecTV, and its nearly ten million subscribers put it much closer to those three than fifth place Dish Network; one analyst has predicted that it’ll become the largest pay TV provider as soon as next year. With this dispute, they’re acting like it, demanding not only a “most favored nation” clause like those enjoyed by the other major providers ensuring they don’t have to pay more than any other provider, but reportedly wanting a lower rate than what those other providers currently pay, at least once they pass them to become the largest distributor. But with Disney reportedly losing three million dollars with each day they remain off YouTube TV, the longer this drags on, the more real the possibility gets that Disney has to make real concessions to return to YouTube TV.
That YouTube TV is not seeing mass cancellations as a result of the dispute is somewhat surprising, because if any type of provider should be susceptible to losing customers as a result of a carriage dispute, it’s streaming providers. Cable customers are stuck with whatever provider happens to serve their area unless someone else happens to have built their own infrastructure, and even satellite providers tend to lock their customers into long-term contracts, require you to return the dish if you cancel, and a lot of their customers are in rural areas not well served with Internet. Streaming TV providers charge you on a month-to-month basis, and anyone can cancel anytime and sign up for a new service using the same equipment you used for the previous one. To be sure, there are some clear differences between various streaming TV services that position themselves differently to different audiences; you’re unlikely to find any service that’s a one-to-one replacement for YouTube TV. Still, ESPN is a pretty big loss if you’re the sort of person who dropped traditional cable or satellite yet still feels the need to get a streaming TV service that’s not Philo in the first place. And yet:
Two takes on the ongoing YouTubeTV vs. Disney/ESPN spat.
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) November 3, 2025
1- YouTubeTV's best in class UX/UI is being rewarded. Lot of people paid the ransom for Fubo, DTV, or ESPN app and many are being vocal that the interface is not as good (likely will stay with YouTubeTV).
Could YouTube TV’s dominance compared to other streaming TV providers really be as simple as having the best interface? Is it really that much better than the competition as to render it immune to the loss of a suite of channels as major and important as ESPN? You wouldn’t think it would be such a deciding factor, especially given the shortcomings I mentioned above; at least some people should be attracted to services with a better channel selection, better price point, or even just better features, but in the end, they seem to be finding those services so much more frustrating to use as to not be worth it. All things considered, the interface should be the easiest thing about YouTube TV to catch up to. Channel selection is subject to negotiations with programmers which also affects what the price point can be, and features have to be coded and integrated into the software, but improving the interface without adding or removing features should be relatively simple. The least you could do is simply copy the YouTube TV interface, but my experience suggests there’s room to even improve on it. Yet YouTube TV’s competitors seem to be allowing their inferior interfaces to remain what could end up being a fatal flaw.
Despite my problems with the YouTube TV interface, I can certainly see other services being worse, and even how YouTube TV has elements of its interface that are genuinely user-friendly. I posted a video showing how hard it can be to find Pardon the Interruption on the ESPN app, scrolling through rows and rows of content to find what I’m looking for if I don’t want to resort to the search function. But realistically, I’m not sure how much they can improve, simply because of the sheer tonnage of sports and on-demand content available in the app when you include everything on ESPN+ (aka ESPN Select). Still, not having to scroll down so far to find algorithmic content would be a pretty simple win; ideally, the top two rows would be a selection of current live games and other content that’s been algorithmically selected based on your watch history, while “upcoming” content should be primarily located in a dedicated section of the app, not the third row on the home screen.
My impression is that most streaming TV providers don’t have interfaces as bad as ESPN’s, but for them, there should be no excuse to lose out on exiles from YouTube TV solely because of the quality of your interface. Most streaming device and smart TV OS’s have their own Live TV section and channel guide, generally populated with various FAST (free ad-supported) channels with OTA channels being integrated if the device has support for tuning into them directly. Most streaming TV services do not integrate their own live TV channels into these guides – Hulu and Fubo don’t, YouTube TV is only integrated on co-owned Google TV, and DirecTV is only integrated on Roku (note that I only know of the services integrated on those two platforms, not any others) – preferring that you engage with their own ecosystem and interface. They wouldn’t be that useful even if they did have more buy-in; Roku’s guide offers little more than the guide itself and the ability to watch programs, with no DVR controls and no broader engine for content discovery beyond the main Home screen. Yet even there, the Rewind and Fast Forward buttons actually do something, skipping through the channel list a page at a time. That isn’t my preference but it’s at least something, and it is potentially useful when scrolling through long lists of channels. Things like that point to simple ways that streaming TV providers can tinker with their interfaces that could go a long way in attracting and retaining customers.
There are two major streaming TV providers with significant access to sports, including ESPN, not listed on the above tweet: Hulu+Live TV and Sling TV. At this point, it seems clear to me that Disney has no intention of making Hulu’s live TV service feel like more than an add-on to the larger Hulu streaming service, which seems to be the big failing of its interface, at least until it’s fully integrated with Fubo. But that still leaves Sling, DirecTV, and Fubo as services for which this should be a huge opportunity. I haven’t tried any of them, but I am going to try and make suggestions for how they can improve their interfaces and potentially win people over from YouTube TV, based on various reviews of their product (especially from Tom’s Guide) and comments posted on social media, primarily The Platform Formerly Known As Twitter. I’m going to be focusing exclusively on each service’s interface on streaming devices like Roku, not web browsers or mobile devices. I’m going to be covering each service in reverse order from what I’ve listed, for reasons that will become apparent.
Fubo: From the start, Fubo has attempted to position itself as a streaming TV service specifically for sports fans, and it does have a number of sports networks no other service has, including more regional sports networks than any service not named DirecTV, as well as several other features tailored for sports fans. But it’s been a perennial also-ran in the streaming TV race. Part of that is its long-standing lack of networks from Time Warner/WarnerMedia/Warner Bros. Discovery, part of it the fact that it hasn’t had a major corporation backing it, and part of that is what has historically been a somewhat steep price point. Fubo does now offer a “Sports+News” package in some areas for $55.99 after a first-month discount with 29 channels, including networks from ESPN, Fox, and CBS, but no NBC, USA, or RSNs; the Pro package at $84.99 after a first-month discount has a more conventional mix of channels, including RSNs and NBC Universal networks, for what looks like a comparable price to YouTube TV (but still more expensive than any service not named DirecTV). But apparently, there are additional fees if RSNs are available in your area, as high as $17 in some areas, and the precise amount isn’t disclosed on the Fubo website, even in fine print, which raises the spectre of the worst aspects of traditional cable (and that’s just one of several scummy tactics that have gotten them referred to the Better Business Bureau). Still, once the Hulu merger is fully integrated, you would expect the first two issues to go away, so what else might hold Fubo back?
The Tom’s Guide review was last updated in May so may not include any changes to the Fubo interface since then, but based on it, the Home screen dedicates a large amount of real estate at the top of the screen to a description and thematically-appropriate image for the currently selected live program on the top row. The Guide similarly has a “Now Playing” column with the logo image associated with the currently-airing programs, while also listing the currently-airing programs in text below the current time slot, which seems redundant, takes up space that could be used to show more programs coming up, and according to the review (which actually appreciates this aspect of the guide), “adds notably to load time.” The Guide also takes up the full height of the screen (except when it’s showing an ad at the top), rather than showing a description of the currently-selected program in the top half like YouTube TV and most guides associated with traditional cable do. In addition, none of the services I looked at had a row of recommended programs airing now like YouTube TV does, which might seem redundant compared to the Home screen but can serve as just another way to ease content discovery and getting to the program a viewer is looking for.
Another quirk of Fubo’s guide has to do with channel filters, which is an area of philosophical difference between YouTube TV and rivals. YouTube TV offers no functionality to filter channels, instead offering different sorting options, including a default sort, an alphabetical sort, sorting by your most watched channels, or a custom sort. This is probably useful for many people, especially if you know what specific channels you want to watch, though there are some limitations on the sorting and even traditional cable’s guides will offer the ability to filter channels by genre. The other services I looked at all have this ability, but while Sling and DirecTV’s filters are on the side and can be accessed just by pressing Left, Fubo’s filters are at the top of the guide, which means you have to find your way to the top to change the filter, which can be cumbersome.
The main area where Fubo’s interface sets itself apart from competitors is at the bottom of its list of tabs, where it has three sections: Sports, Shows, and Movies. One area I imagine people might quibble with YouTube TV about is that it does not have a dedicated On Demand area at all; if YouTube TV offers On Demand content at all, it’s tucked inside pages for each show that have to be accessed from the Guide or the Home screen, requiring a lot of scrolling in the latter case, or by clicking the channel icon itself from the Guide (which is especially unintuitive as YouTube TV’s Guide tab is labeled Live). By contrast, other services will have an On Demand section (usually) presenting an algorithmically curated selection of On Demand content, but Fubo’s is split between two different screens. The Tom’s Guide review praises this as making it easier to sort through all the content available by keeping shows out of the way of movies or vice versa, but I can see it being frustrating for others.
When watching live TV on YouTube TV, pressing any of the D-pad buttons (or the Replay↪️ button – sorry, there doesn’t seem to be an emoji that looks exactly like it so I went with one that at least rotates in the right direction) pulls up an overlay with the title of the current show, your current position relative to the duration of the show, and a number of other items you can access by pressing Down, changing streaming settings for the current show, browsing what’s on other networks, firing up Multiview, or watching other episodes of the current show. Pressing Left or Right without pressing Down moves the current stream back or forward in time (to the extent possible), but you have to press OK or Play/Pause⏯️ to continue watching from there. Pressing Up from the basic overlay doesn’t do anything; as mentioned earlier, you have to press Back to pull up the Guide or Home screens.
Most of this appears to be the same on Fubo, but pressing Down brings up a selection of “recommended” channels and only allows you to scroll through different filters of those channels, which is especially eyebrow-raising as Fubo does have limited multiview on some devices but doesn’t seem to have any way of firing it up directly from the current program. Despite spending most of the review gushing over Fubo, the Tom’s Guide review ultimately considers YouTube TV to offer a “better viewing experience” as Fubo only offers most non-4K live TV channels in 720p, while YouTube TV offers many of them in 1080p. That may not matter if your situation is like mine, with a relatively small TV and an Internet connection that’s unreliable enough that the stream will sometimes degrade considerably in quality, but if you have a big screen and a strong connection it could be a difference-maker.
This Yahoo review from March has a few other quibbles. In their reviewer’s experience, they could press and hold Back to return to the previously playing program from the full-screen interface on Roku, and the audio from that program would continue while browsing the menus, but on Google TV the audio would shut off and there would be no easy way to return to the previous program. I find that interesting because for me, YouTube TV used to work like the former but then suddenly started acting like the latter, and I wonder if there’s some sort of compatibility issue going on. It also finds the search to be lacking, making it sound like you can only search by title or channel (not things like actors or genre), and calls out the lack of any parental controls.
This tweet describes the Fubo interface as “slow and cluttered”, suggesting a less-is-more approach could be helpful, with fewer redundant and space-hogging interface elements and a generally streamlined experience with minimal delays in moving through the interface. I also see complaints about the ads popping up on the guide, but YouTube TV and traditional cable have ads in their guides as well; the difference is, their ads appear in the middle of the guide or at the top but within the rows of channels so they can be scrolled past, rather than constantly at the top of the screen except when they aren’t. Hulu seems to have a decent, simple live TV interface if you can overlook the need to wade through the main Hulu streaming service to get to it, so here’s hoping that once it’s integrated with Fubo the interface takes more cues from the Hulu side. But it would also be a good idea to improve the picture and audio quality, because the sort of sports fans able and willing to pay a premium for Fubo are likely to have the sort of setup that benefits from video and audio quality that’s as good as possible. And the impression I get is that with all the blame coming Disney’s way for the YouTube TV dispute, a lot of people are staying away from Hulu and Fubo at all costs to avoid giving Disney any more money than necessary, so in the end, whether or not the newly-merged Fubo succeeds may not have much to do with the quality of the service itself.
DirecTV: DirecTV has been pivoting away from their traditional satellite business for a while, no longer branding their streaming offering separately from the rest of DirecTV despite some differences in the channel lineups, and some have wondered if DirecTV intends to eventually leave the satellite business entirely – and their satellite packages are certainly buried deep enough on their web site compared to their streaming packages (fifth on the “Shop” menu compared to first) as not to dispel the notion of it. But presenting what amounts to a traditional cable experience over streaming seems to present the worst of both worlds and defeats the point of cutting the cord even harder than most streaming TV providers do. DirecTV offers a number of channels not available on any other streaming TV provider, including C-SPAN and the largest selection of regional sports networks, but at a steep price: their cheapest regular package, the Entertainment package, costs $89.99 a month with fees after the first month (which DirecTV at least discloses more than Fubo). That’s for a package that includes many of the most popular channels, including broadcast stations, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1, TBS, TNT, and USA, but any sports networks that are even remotely niche, including RSNs, college conference networks, league networks, lower-tier ESPN and Fox channels, and even TruTV, require the even more expensive Choice package at $115 a month after the first month.
But it’s no longer necessary for sports fans to pay the full freight for a traditional wide-ranging cable package, as DirecTV has been rolling out and adding channels to their genre packages. The MySports package not only offers the Big Four networks and Big Four league networks plus Golf Channel, as well as every conference-specific and general-purpose sports-airing network from the Big Five sports-airing companies, but the major news networks CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CNBC, and Fox Business as well, covering almost all your live content needs, for just $69.99 a month. RSNs are a separate $19.99/month add-on, while MySports Extra adds NFL RedZone and a number of niche channels for $12.99/month. It wasn’t the case that long ago, but it is possible for sports fans to sign up for DirecTV and save money.
Unfortunately, DirecTV’s traditional cable roots still betray it when it comes to the interface. They won’t force a particular device on you like traditional cable providers would and like you’d likely have to if you signed up for their satellite service, but they do offer a bundle with their Gemini Air device with their traditional wide-ranging packages (but not, as far as I can tell, the genre packs – and for that matter, I’m not sure if there’s a way to get their traditional packages without getting the Gemini, so maybe they do force it on you), which incurs a $10/month device lease fee, apparently defrayed to $5 for the first 24 months (reflected in the listed prices) but still becoming more expensive than simply bringing your own device after less than a year. The Gemini Air comes with a cable-like remote with most of the buttons you might expect on a cable remote, such as number keys to punch in channel numbers. The DirecTV interface isn’t completely non-functional without a full-service remote, but nonetheless the fact that their preferred device comes with such a remote is telling about the perspective it’s designed from.
The Tom’s Guide review alone points to a lot of the problems. Some of them are simply unforced errors – if you’ve set up favorite channels, the Home screen will show them to you, but in the reverse order that you set them, not in any more coherent order. (The Yahoo review claims the top bar of the Home screen consists of “recently visited channels”, but I’m not sure if either review misinterpreted the situation or if Yahoo’s reviewer just didn’t set up any favorites.) But the real problems are a direct result of streaming device remotes seemingly being an afterthought. While watching TV, pressing the Left or Right buttons will change the channel, as opposed to operating the DVR like on every other streaming service; even Yahoo’s review, which otherwise heaped praise on the interface, pointed out how unintuitive this is. I can see why they’d do this – the DVR controls are arguably redundant with the actual rewind, fast forward, play/pause, and even replay buttons – but I feel like using Up and Down for that purpose, like Roku’s Live TV Channel Guide does, would be more intuitive. (I remember having a TV where the Channel and Volume buttons were arranged to double as D-pad buttons when in the TV’s menus, with Up and Down being the Channel buttons and Left and Right being for Volume.) It’s not like they’re using Up and Down for much – pressing Down just takes you back to the Home screen, when I could hit Back for that purpose on other services, so it’s not like there’s much of a mini-interface there to control like on YouTube TV or Fubo.
Part of what might explain this is that the way the Home screen works in general could represent a learning curve for someone used to YouTube TV, compared to other streaming services. Based on the picture from the Yahoo review, whatever channel is currently selected on the top bar, DirecTV will show what’s currently playing on that channel, and other programs similar to that currently playing program. If Home is expected to take the place of other services’ mini-interfaces, this makes sense, but I hope it doesn’t reflect what DirecTV does when the app initially starts and you’re just looking for the program you actually want to watch, assuming you aren’t planning to just surf. What’s more, the similar programs listed may all be related to the channel you’re currently viewing, so if you’re watching an ESPN talk show you won’t get any suggestions for shows on FS1 or vice versa. (This may only matter for nerds, but there’s also no way to verify the exact quality of your current stream, which could be important when trying to decide whether a service provides good enough picture and sound for your setup.)
If you’re making the switch directly from cable and you’re willing to pay the extra monthly fee for Gemini, DirecTV may be perfectly intuitive for you, and the reviews I read suggested that it works fine on web browsers and mobile devices. But DirecTV needs to give their interface a thorough rethinking when it comes to streaming devices with simpler remotes. There are some good aspects of it – DirecTV does show program descriptions simply by browsing the guide, like YouTube TV and unlike Fubo – but I’m a bit worried they may need to rethink their philosophy if they want to compete with YouTube TV. The differences in how the Home screen works aren’t just quirks, they might suggest that DirecTV sees the channel as primary and the content as secondary, which may have been true at the peak of the traditional cable bundle but isn’t how audiences see things now.
Sling: I’m honestly not sure how much Dish still cares about Sling. Oh sure, they still run plenty of advertisements for it, so they see it as something worth continuing to sell and spend money on promoting it. But when Sling Blue launched and brought with it the introduction of streaming on multiple screens, I thought for sure the only reason the ESPNs didn’t have multi-streaming available was because Disney was the first company to sign up with Dish for Sling, before streaming TV existed in any real capacity. Yet here we are nearly a decade later and you still can’t stream the ESPNs or other Disney channels to multiple TVs, or multi-stream at all with Sling Orange. For all I know, Dish is perfectly content to let Sling continue operating with the status quo indefinitely and sees no reason to make any improvements on it, no matter what the circumstances.
In any case, Sling’s interface isn’t exactly terrible anyway; it’s apparently been knocked for its interface in the past, but the Tom’s Guide review found it easy enough to use and it might be the closest interface to YouTube TV’s. I actually did install the Sling app to try out the interface for myself using their Freestream service. The main sections should be familiar enough: Search, Home, Guide, DVR, and On Demand. The Home screen might be the most similar to YouTube TV of the services I looked at, with the first row of the Home screen consisting of shows airing now without a bunch of wasted space above it like Fubo, the main difference being that a show will start autoplaying in the space it’s in if you linger on it too long (and if you linger on it longer than that it’ll start playing full-screen), making it more like DirecTV’s Home screen. I can see that getting annoying, but I’m not sure it’s that different from how YouTube used to autoplay a recommended program on launch in the background before the relationship between the full-screen menus and live TV abruptly changed. I also don’t know if recently recorded shows appear there or in the “recommended for you” row below it, like how it’ll appear in YouTube TV’s top row, or if it appears exclusively in a separate row.
There’s also a streaming hub with all the streaming services that you may have added as add-ons, which also appears on the On Demand screen; I would argue, however, that On Demand content should be presented largely agnostic of the specific service offering it. I also have a quibble with the Guide section; like Fubo, the Guide seems to take up the full height of the screen, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to pull up any sort of description of a currently-airing program other than moving to the left and pulling up the channel view.
On the other hand, some elements of the Sling-watching experience are clearly superior to YouTube TV. Specifically, pressing Up while watching live TV actually does something, allowing you to choose between “Channel Surfing”, flipping through channels the way you would on traditional cable (take note, DirecTV); “Guide”, allowing you to scroll through the guide, and the rest of the full-screen interface, with the program you’re watching in picture-in-picture; and “Sport Scores”, which shows a list of sports scores on the right side of the screen. Keeping the current program in picture-in-picture while scrolling the Guide is especially useful for catching if an exciting moment happens in a sports event you’re watching without it being obscured by the Guide itself. In some ways, being able to go to the Guide by pressing Up and then OK solves a problem of Sling’s own making, as if you fired up a program from anywhere but the Guide, getting to the Guide is likely to involve way more button presses than on YouTube TV where you can just hit Back and then Right. Even the press-Up approach might seem to be a wash compared to YouTube TV, but the current program, if applicable, is pre-selected, whereas with YouTube TV, if you didn’t get to the current program from the Guide, you have to go Down several steps just to get to the Guide itself and then potentially having to scroll past several channels if you aren’t interested in what’s on the top few channels.
Still, all told, I’m not sure why I saw so many tweets complaining about the Sling interface when I looked for them, with none of them providing any specifics beyond being slow. (To be clear, I searched for “sling interface” so I got a bunch of tweets that could have been either good or bad, and Fubo seemed to get as many tweets praising its interface as condemning it.) As far as I’m concerned, Sling has a perfectly serviceable interface with only a handful of relatively minor quibbles and even improves on YouTube TV in spots, and it offers most of the channels a sports fan could want for $65.99 a month, currently offering a half-off discount, but even at full price it’s $17 cheaper than YouTube TV’s full price. So why isn’t it getting more attention as a YouTube TV alternative? There are some features it lacks like multiview and “catch up with key plays”, but those don’t seem like they should be make-or-break; YouTube TV already dominated the streaming TV provider space before introducing multiview outside Sunday Ticket. The lack of unlimited DVR could be more problematic, but 50 hours should be plenty if you’re only interested in a streaming TV provider for sports.
The real problem is the channel selection. If DirecTV’s problem is that it’s too bloated, Sling has the opposite problem, having too lean a channel selection in some ways. Most sports networks are available, though you will need to pay $11 for the Sports Extra package to get channels like ESPNU, NBATV, or MLB Network, but neither CBS nor CBS Sports Network is available. CBS, in particular, might be an unacceptable loss for NFL and college basketball fans, though it’s CBSSN that airs content that isn’t available by simply getting Paramount+. Other broadcast networks, meanwhile, are only available in places where the local station is owned-and-operated, so you only get all three of ABC, NBC, and Fox in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area, and that still won’t give you the CW, PBS, Ion, or most anything else airing over the air – and the price is $5 cheaper if you don’t get ABC.
More than most streaming services, Sling has leaned into using an antenna to fill out the channel lineup with broadcast stations, offering the AirTV device to integrate broadcast stations with the Sling interface. If you live in an area where you can get over-the-air signals clearly enough, you can get a perfectly good antenna for less than $20, but AirTV is not cheap. Sling presents the AirTV Anywhere, which includes four tuners and 1 TB of DVR space, as nearly $250 of value when part of a bundle with an antenna; the AirTV 2 is $150 as part of the same bundle, but you have to bring your own storage, and apparently you can’t pause live TV with it. (Amazon lists the AirTV 2 as $79.99 on its own, but doesn’t seem to offer AirTV Anywhere at all, and I’m not sure the AirTV 2 they claim to offer isn’t counterfeit.) You can pay $99 for the AirTV Anywhere bundle and $49 for the AirTV 2 bundle when you prepay for three months of Sling, but that’s still pretty pricey and I doubt a lot of sports fans can afford to pay $200, let alone $250, at once. This might actually be a case where traditional cable’s long-term contracts could be helpful, allowing people to amortize the cost of this setup over the course of years. (Alternately, Sling does integrate its channels into Roku’s Live TV Channel Guide and other TV OS’s live channel guides, like DirecTV but not YouTube TV or Fubo, but if you have a separate streaming device as opposed to a smart TV, integrating OTA content into the guide would still require getting a pricey external device, assuming it’s possible at all; the cheapest Tablo tuner and DVR costs $99.95 without an antenna, and bundling it with an antenna is an extra $30.)
There are definitely some places where Sling can improve its interface, but as it stands it should work perfectly fine for people looking for a YouTube TV alternative. The problem is that, philosophically, it just might not work well enough for the hardcore sports fan. If you need CBS, PBS, CW, or Ion, or live in an area with ABC, NBC, or Fox affiliates that aren’t network-owned, it really only works if you a) live in an urban area where you can get broadcast signals clearly and b) have the disposable income to purchase an antenna and setup that will integrate it with your streaming device, and if you have that sort of income you’re more likely to get Fubo or DirecTV if they improve their interfaces.
What struck me most of all while I was finishing up this post was that not only is making the interface as good as possible something relatively simple that can pay surprisingly big dividends for streaming TV providers, simplicity itself may well be YouTube TV’s biggest interface advantage over rivals, and I don’t even mean simplicity of use. YouTube TV’s interface is built out of a few very basic elements with most of them made of basic text and pictures and few bells and whistles; I could almost see it being programmed with basic HTML. That might have a lot to do with how quickly it loads, whereas slowness was a complaint I saw with both Fubo and Sling. Things like Fubo’s space-hogging top section of the Home screen and redundant program logos on the Guide, DirecTV and Sling autoplaying video from within the Home screen, having certain interface elements take more space and have more elaborate backgrounds than needed like the top of DirecTV’s Library section seen in the Tom’s Guide review, the currently selected channel on Sling’s Guide taking up more space to show genre and other information, even things I like like Sling’s picture-in-picture and things as subtle as DirecTV’s interface having a blue gradient background rather than plain black or all three services’ use of icons for their main interface sections when YouTube uses plain text, all run the risk of bogging down the service, cluttering the screen, and giving people too much to process. I almost wonder if a lone nerd in his basement with nothing but a Roku dev kit could put together a better streaming TV interface than any of these three services and potentially one competitive with YouTube TV.
In short, I feel like Sling’s interface is underrated, but its low cost is probably more than outweighed by the high barrier to entry to get it to work for even the typical sports fan. DirecTV has produced an offering that might be hard to pass up for sports fans, but it needs to seriously rethink its interface and how it works on streaming devices other than its own before it’ll be able to pull away customers from YouTube TV. Fubo has some weird elements and unforced errors to its interface, more than Sling, but it should be relatively simple to fix them and it now has the resources to come up with a better solution, not to mention to finally bring Warner Bros. Discovery channels back in the fold – but the company providing those resources not only has a mixed track record with its own interface, it’s tanked its own reputation so much that its mere presence may doom Fubo’s chances of luring away sports fans. All three could potentially win over more customers than you might think by rethinking and simplifying their interfaces, with Fubo’s sports-centric features and DirecTV’s sports-centric offering having the most opportunity – but they might not have much time. If YouTube TV gets its way with enough carriage negotiations, they might become impossible to compete on price with (at least for anyone other than DirecTV) and effective enough at capturing customers in their ecosystem as to make it difficult to leave even if you could compete on price.