Sling TV has announced that it will soon be giving its users a major overhaul. The new look will provide users with a more customized experience and look better.
The news comes directly to individual users through a message that appears when they launch the Sling TV app on their Fire TV device. The message begins with "We've been listening!" in the corner of the navigation screen, as if to say, "You've been complaining, and we're finally sprucing things up." And this is exactly what Sling needs to do to maintain its status as one of the best streaming services.
This need for change is consistent with what we said in our review of Sling TV: "Perhaps because it has been in the live TV streaming market for a while, Sling does not seem to have updated its interface to keep up with its competitors. Fellow low-cost live TV service Philo is much smarter. The big boys, YouTube TV and Hulu With Live TV, both boast deep, rich experiences.
Sling's message continues. 'A simpler, more beautiful, and more personalized TV experience is on the way.' The all-new Sling app will soon be available on your device."
The Sling app is also available on the Sling website.
But how long will other devices (e.g., Roku devices and Apple TV) have to wait? At the bottom of the message, it says, "The new Sling app ... . will be available for all devices later this year." When companies say "later this year," it often really means "by the end of the year," as we saw when it took months for the new Fire TV interface to be available on half of these streaming devices.
This is an interesting way to roll out the new Sling app and favor Fire TV users. The streaming platform wars have been heating up recently, and this would offer the Fire TV's 50 million monthly active users something that Roku users do not have. Right now, Fire TV does not yet have Peacock streaming service, but this is expected to be fixed by the 2021 Olympics in July.
And while Roku has practically all the apps, the current spat between Roku and Google has taken the YouTube TV app out of the Roku directory; Google responded by putting YouTube TV into Roku's YouTube app, which is now available on the Fire TV, We have yet to hear the last of this mini-war.
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