After delaying for 24 hours the launch of HBO service on its Sling TV platform last week to iron out technical glitches, Dish Network's (NASDAQ: DISH) OTT platform still experienced streaming hiccups Sunday during the much-watched season-five premiere of HBO's Game of Thrones.
Roku users reported long wait times for the Sling browser to load on their streaming devices, complaining on platforms including Twitter Sunday evening.
The reports followed similar troubles a week earlier, when the high volume of viewership for the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Final Four on Turner Networks also caused streaming disruptions for Sling TV.
Sling CEO Roger Lynch acknowledged the Roku problems in a Sunday-evening blog post, noting that his technical team was looking into the issue.
Lynch also spun the evening's Game of Thrones presentation as an overall positive, saying the technical problems experienced Sunday were much less broad and severe than those experienced for March Madness.
"We made updates to a variety of core systems to improve user experience from account creation to service delivery," Lynch wrote. "We also distributed updates to the app across all of our platforms starting late last week. These updates helped in load management and delivered new features, like parental controls."
For more:
- see this Dish Network blog post
- see this TechCrunch story
- see this TV Predictions story
Related links:
Sling TV pushes back HBO launch to Saturday to fix streaming tech
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Sling TV pushes back HBO launch to Saturday to fix streaming tech