Sling TV — the third-largest streaming provider of live TV in the U.S. — today announced across-the-board price increases. Starting after December 3, 2022, the base Sling TV service will cost $40, up $5 from the previous price. That’s for a single subscription to either the Sling Orange plan, or the Sling Blue plan. If you want both, it’ll now cost $55 — another $5 increase.
The price increase — which applies to new and current subscribers — comes on the heels of parent company Dish’s third-quarter earnings announcement, which saw Sling TV add about 214,000 subscribers for the three months ending September 30, 2022. That gives Sling TV a total of 2.411 million subscribers and snaps a six-month streak of subscriber losses.
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Sling TV Group President Gary Schanman explained the price increase in an early-morning blog post.
“Sling doesn’t own the networks you watch — we pay programmers for their channels, and the price of programming continues to rise,” Schanman wrote. “We’re deeply committed to keeping costs low and continually work with programmers to provide service you can rely on, which is why we haven’t raised prices in nearly two years, maintaining a generous cost advantage compared to our competitors.”
Schanman also noted that Sling TV plans to add more than 150 new channels through 2023, new user profiles, and “Auto Bing Watching capabilities.”
Sling TV is as close as you can get to true a la carte TV, in which you theoretically would pay for only what you want to watch. Sling Orange and Sling Blue each have a relatively small number of channels compared to the more expensive YouTube TV or Hulu With Live TV, both of which have a single plan with upwards of 100 channels each. Sling Orange and Sling Blue have some overlap in channel listings, but the idea is that they’re different enough that you’d probably want both. From there, you’d augment your lineup with Sling “Extras” — additional add-ons that augment channels in categories like sports, news, and entertainment.
With the price increase, Sling TV edges slightly closer to the competitors it’s chasing, but its subscriber count also remains pretty stagnant at roughly the same number as it sported at the end of 2018. By comparison, YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers as of June 2022, and Hulu With Live TV last announced 4 million subscribers. (Hulu’s parent company, Disney, will update those numbers on November 8, 2022.)
Sling TV remains available on every major streaming platform, including Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, Android TV, Google TV, web browsers, smart TV platforms, and gaming consoles.
YouTube TV password sharing — is that even a thing?
There's been a little bit of a to-do this week about YouTube TV cracking down on password sharing. Potentially. Ya know, like Netflix is doing. Except not really, or at all, probably. And that has to do almost entirely with how YouTube TV's account structure works.
First, some context. A few posts on Reddit stated that some family members — that is, not the primary account holder — were being asked to sign up to YouTube TV, despite already being authorized to use the service. YouTube TV allows for up to six family members to share one YouTube TV subscription, with one of them serving as the primary account. Those family members basically have to be anyone older than 13 who lives with the primary account holder.
The Digital Trends guide to FAST streaming services
When you talk about the best streaming services, you typically talk about video-on-demand (VOD) services like Netflix. Or Disney+. Or Amazon Prime Video. Or Hulu. And for good reason — they have a ton of paying subscribers. Netflix alone is closing in on a quarter-billion. Disney+ is about halfway there.
And while the numbers drop off a good bit from there, another flavor of streaming should constitute a good bit of the discussion. FAST services — that's the industry acronym for free advertising-based streaming television — continue to grow both in numbers and in popularity. Think of FAST like the streaming version of broadcast TV, or your cable box. Shows are on at the same time for everyone, and everyone is watching the same thing, with ads. Only unlike YouTube TV or Hulu With Live TV, you don't have to pay anything upfront. It's all supported by advertising — you just don't get the "good" channels like you will on the paid services.
YouTube TV adds Magnolia Network and other FAST channels
YouTube TV has added a handful of channels of the FAST variety — that is, the sort of thing you'd find on an ad-supported service like Tubi or The Roku Channel. The additions are hardly the only FAST channels on the largest live-streaming service in the U.S., which has more than 5 million subscribers as of June 2022.
New to YouTube TV are Magnolia Network, Charge!, TBD TV, and T2. The CW also makes an appearance in the list of new channels after a new deal was reached earlier this spring.
