Sling TV couldn’t quite handle the amount of users trying to access its streams of this weekend’s NCAA basketball games.
The Dish Network-operated service, which offers live TV streaming from a variety of channels starting at $20 per month, apologized Saturday after users had trouble accessing clean feeds of the Final Four games.
We're sorry some basketball fans saw errors tonight due to extreme sign-ups and streaming. Engineers rebalanced load across network partners
— Sling Answers (@slinganswers) April 5, 2015
It wasn’t great timing for Sling, as the March Madness semifinal games — Duke vs. Michigan State and Kentucky vs. Wisconsin — were the most-watched Final Four match-ups in 19 years for regular cable TV.
Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch told Peter Kafka at Re/code that only 1,000 users were affected. And given problems that other media companies have had with streams of big games, it’s not too surprising that Dish had issues this weekend.
Still, as Kafka noted, companies like Sling TV that are encouraging customers to cancel their cable subscriptions in place of a streaming service should expect customer frustration when online feeds don’t work properly.
Sling TV will have another test this weekend when HBO debuts a new season of Game of Thrones. The service inked a deal with HBO last week that offers access to all of the premium shows produced by HBO for an extra $15 per month.
Speaking of streaming, NCAA noted that its March Madness Live app — which streams live games — has racked up more than 77 million live video streams and 16.8 million live hours of video consumption, both all-time records and up more than 15 percent from last year.
