I first tried Sling TV in March during the NCAA tournament. The experience was so bad in watching just one basketball game, I finally gave up. I couldn’t keep a signal long enough to make it work.

So it’s been nearly six months and we are at the beginning of the college football season and I thought I would try again. If anything the experience was worse. I tried to watch Maryland play Richmond, which was on ESPNU. So I paid my $20, found out that ESPNU was an additive and paid $5 more and sat down to watch the game.

I had all of the same problems I had 6 months ago. During the course of the game I got 3 blue screens of death. The only other time that’s happened on this computer was the last time I watched Sling TV. The signal also kept freezing and I had to reboot to get it going again. Since last spring they have added an apology message when this happens, but it happens a lot and after a while you start cursing the error message. When you try to log back in to a game, Sling TV often doesn’t recognize your credentials and you have to close and reopen the program multiple times.

Maryland’s punt returner, Will Likely, had a Big 10 record day returning kicks and every time he touched the ball was electric. Or so I hear since I missed several of them.

To give a little credit to Sling TV, I went to several sports forums where others were talking about watching the Maryland game on TV and they reported that the signal was poor.

So then I did some channel surfing among the other broadcast (non-sports) channels. I never got booted out of any of these. There were major issues with audio. The volume difference between stations was huge and I could barely hear the Rocky marathon even with my computer sound system on full, a setting that would normally break out my windows. And like last spring, several times the audio feed lagged the video feed and I had to reboot the feed.

Bottom line is that after six months of doing this, Sling TV has exactly the same problems that they had during their first month online. They are still not ready for prime time. If any OTT provider wants to get the sports audience they are going to have to do much better than this. It is still better to listen to streaming radio than to watch a sporting event on Sling TV.