Sling vs Disney: resolved

Well that didn't last long.

It did last long enough to really tick off a bunch of people, and if their angry posts on the Sling TV User Group are to be believed, some canceled their subscriptions. I'll come back to this in a minute.

Disney and Dish (parent of Sling) reached an agreement last night to restore the Disney owned channels to Dish and, more importantly to streamers, Sling TV.

The dispute covered the college football weekend, and impacted some college football fans, including me. The timing was really bad for many people.

Some college football fans had to do without, or went to a sports bar. Some subscribed to a different service. Some did a free trial of a service, and will be able to continue their Sling TV service going forward without any additional expense.

A friend of mine was impacted by the outage and contacted me for help. I suggested that since she had never subscribed to YouTube TV or to Vidgo, that she do a free trial on one of those services. That would accomplish two things. First, she would be able to watch the Georgia game Saturday night (her main concern). Second, she would see what this other service had to offer, and could decide to make the switch permanent (well, long term anyway).

Some of the impacted Sling TV users may have done the same thing, opting for a service with a free trial and seeing if it was a better experience for them. Others rage quit and unless the timing was such that their Sling TV subscription was at the end of the cycle anyway, they're now paying for two services.

The lesson there is don't rage quit. Think things through. That's what my friend did, and she reached out to me for help. I was able to give her good information about what options she had, and after talking for just a few minutes, she was able to have a temporary solution, and could decide later what to do long term. She was smart about it, and it's not costing her a lot of extra money.

Oh, and the others that rage quit Sling TV and went to another service without thinking things through? These carriage disputes happen regularly. And they just moved to a service which will have a contract renewal with Disney coming sooner than Sling will. Sling just had its contract renewal.

This will happen again, and those that rage quit will run into it sooner than those that were calm and careful about their options. So again, don't rage quite. Be smart. It will make your Streaming Life better in both the short run and in the long run.