Sling TV Rejiggers Its Cord-Cutting Service
- Paul Thurrott
- Jun 28, 2018
-
10
Sling TV announced a major restructuring of its cord-cutting service, with new free and à la carte offerings. But it is also raising the price of its core subscription offering, Sling Orange, by $5, to $25 per month.
“When we first launched Sling in 2015, we set out to create an entertainment experience that put our customers first, offering unprecedented flexibility and control [with] no annual contracts, no hidden fees, and the ability to customize programming,” Sling TV president Warren Schlichting says in a prepared statement. “The new Sling evolves the experience even further by providing access to great content without anchoring customers to a base subscription.”
Windows Intelligence In Your Inbox
Sign up for our new free newsletter to get three time-saving tips each Friday — and get free copies of Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (normally $9.99) as a special welcome gift!
"*" indicates required fields
To date, Sling TV has offered two basic subscriptions, called Sling Orange and Sling Blue, plus a variety of extras like cloud DVR, additional genre channel packs (like sports and comedy), premium channels (HBO, Cinemax, and so on), NBA team passes, and more. The prices of all of these options will remain unchanged, save that of Sling Orange, is going up by $5 per month.
What’s new, however, is that Sling TV is now offering a selection of 100 hours of TV shows and movies for free, giving those who are not paying for the service a chance to sample it.
Additionally, Sling TV is providing select channels for purchase in à la carte form, and these are available to anyone, even those without a subscription. Dove Channel, Outside TV Features, and Stingray Karaoke are launching today, and Sling says that it will offer additional à la carte channels, like CuriosityStream, Pantaya, and Up Faith & Family, in the near future.
I am a Sling TV user—in fact, we recently dropped YouTube TV to focus solely on Sling for Internet-based live and recorded TV—so I’m pretty interested in these changes. But they don’t seem to impact my particular situation, though I might be adding Showtime for a month so we can binge-watch the latest season of Homeland.