Dish is going after cord cutters with a new service called Sling TV. Dish announced the service during CES 2015, and for only $20 a month you’ll get access to large TV channels like ESPN. Dish says the service has been years in the making and could bring us to cutting the cords and going with only internet.
Dish will use the Sling brand, but it won’t be related in anyway to the Hopper with Sling which Dish has used the name for before. Dish could have come up with a better name or something more unique. The naming though and lack of their logo anywhere shows they don’t want the new service to interfere with their current model.
Sling TV includs ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Travel Channel, Food Network, ABC Family, HGTV, Disney Channel and Maker which all costing $20-per-month. The service will be on iOS, Android, Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Nexus Player, Xbox One, Rokus and LG and Samsung smart TVs, as well as on the web on Mac and PC.
The lack of Dish branding is huge and while this is huge having ESPN without a cable subscription there are some caveats. ESPN can can cancel their contract with Sling TV if a certain number of subscribers subscribe. This makes the whole thing a huge experiment for the Disney owned sport channel.