One of the major things that held me back from cutting back on cable last year was the loss of ESPN. Turns out, it wasn’t that big of a deal. If I had it, I probably would have watched it, but I guess I don’t really miss it at this point.
That being said, there will come a point where I really want to watch ESPN or some other channel that I lost access to. There’s now an awesome online solution for this and it’s called Sling Television (no relation to the Sling Box.) It’s basically an online cable subscription. For $20/month you get ESPN, ESPN2, TNT, TBS, Food, HGTV, Travel, Cartoon Network, Disney, ABC Family, CNN, and a couple others. There are a few $5 add-on packs if you want more sports, etc. Notably the ESPN package includes access to WatchESPN.com. The best part is that it’s super easy to sign up and super easy to cancel and it comes with a free 7 day trial.
If you’re a cord cutter but can’t give up access to live TV and some of these channels then this could be a great solution. The major drawback at this point is that only some of the channels have any type of DVR functionality (they store ~3 days of content) but stations like ESPN don’t enable this. And only some of the stations allow you to watch On Demand back episodes. If you’re looking for live TV, this is the way to go, but if you want to time shift your TV, you’ll want to pay more attention to what you actually get during the trial period.
While this might not be the perfect service for all circumstances, it’s still fantastic to see us getting closer to the dream of watching what we want, when we want, where we want, on whatever device we want.