Sling Free: Is Sling TV Really Free?
Sling Free is Sling TV’s ad-supported, not-cost tier—but is it any good? The CableTV.com experts dive in.
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Sling Free is Sling TV’s answer to ad-supported free streaming services like Pluto TV, Tubi, and Xumo. It features a mix of live and on-demand content, including TV shows, movies, kids, news, and sports programming. It’s also completely free—you don’t even have to provide a credit card number or login info.
As with the other free streamers, the selection on Sling Free is a rando assortment of older movies and TV shows with unskippable commercial breaks. You’re not going to find the latest Marvel flicks or cable hits like Mayans for free, but sci-fi cheese like Mega Snake and all 110 episodes of ’90s biker drama Renegade? Sling Free has ’em.
You can access Sling Free by going to sling.com on a web browser (Chrome, Edge, or Safari only) or downloading the Sling TV app to your streaming device (like Amazon Fire TV, Android, LG TV, Roku, Samsung TV, or Xbox).
Select “Explore Free Shows,” and you’ll be taken to a My TV page displaying rows upon rows of free TV shows and movies. By selecting the Guide tab, you’ll see a grid of “live” channels (with the exception of some news channels, the shows and movies are on a perpetual loop).
You can also select Sports and On Demand from the tabs menu, where you’ll be greeted with many a TV and movie labeled “Subscribe,” meaning you’d have to upgrade to a paid Sling TV plan to actually watch them. Sling Free is consistent with this upsell tactic.
Under the Rentals tab, you can pay to watch more recent movies than the Sling Free selection offers. The average rental fee is around $4 per movie, though some just-released studio films go for $20 (just wait a few weeks—the price will come down). Rentals don’t feature ads, BTW.
Sling Free features over 80 channels, which are roughly a 50/50 split of live-looping shows and on-demand-only content (most of the live channels also have on-demand movies and TV shows).
Some of the channels—which could be more accurately called content hubs—are familiar, like AMC and Discovery. But you’ve probably never heard of most of them, like Choppertown or Kabillion.
Between those channels, Sling Free streams over 5,000 TV shows and movies. You won’t see everything from cable network channels, though: AMC Presents is mostly reruns of The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead but no Better Call Saul, and SHOWTIME serves up only a single episode of hits like Billions and Black Monday. Hey, you get what you pay for.
These are the channels included with Sling Free:
Sling Free’s channels, which are also accessible through paid Sling TV plans, are essentially samplers of what you’d get with a full subscription to Sling Orange, Sling Blue, or Sling Orange + Blue.
Free is free, can’t argue with that. As long as you don’t set your expectations too high, Sling Free is decent gratis entertainment.
Just know that you’ll be frequently nudged to upgrade to a paid Sling TV plan—Sling Free is kind of like an open-ended free trial in place of the actual free trial period Sling TV used to offer.
Sling Free does not refer to a free trial period to try out Sling TV. In fact, Sling TV no longer offers free trials. Sling Free is an ad-supported free version of Sling TV that offers over 80 channels of live and on-demand content, with over 5,000 movies and TV shows.
Channels on Sling Free include AMC, IFC, Discovery, ABC News Live, CBSN, SHOWTIME, and dozens of less familiar channels. Some channels stream only select content, while others include full seasons of shows (FilmRise has all 84 episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, for instance).
Sling Free does not require registration or a credit card number. Simply access Sling TV through its streaming device app or go to watch.sling.com. Sling Free is also available to paying Sling TV customers.
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