Dish Network’s Sling TV is hiking prices on its monthly streaming plans by $5, bringing both packages to $40 per month.
Sling TV’s updated pricing will go into effect immediately for new subscribers and apply to existing customers’ next bill on or after Dec. 3, 2022. With the change, the monthly cost for Sling Orange (which includes ESPN) and Sling Blue (which includes Fox and NBC channels) will now each be $40 per month, and the Sling Orange & Blue bundle will be $55 monthly.
“Raising prices for our customers is not something we take lightly,” Sling TV group president Gary Schanman wrote in a blog post. “We recognize that historically high inflation is impacting our customers every day and our goal is not to be another burden to your wallet.”
Schanman continued, “However, Sling doesn’t own the networks you watch — we pay programmers for their channels, and the price of programming continues to rise. 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.”
Sling TV plans to add more than 150 new channels through 2023, as well as new user profiles for multiple members of a household and an auto binge-watching feature, according to Schanman.
Sling TV ended the third quarter with 2.411 million subscribers, up 214,000 from 2.197 million in Q2, but that still down 145,000 from 2.556 million for Q3 2021. For Q3, Sling’s growth boosted Dish’s overall pay-TV subs by a sequential net gain of 30,000 to 10.018 million, as the satellite side of the house lost 183,000 customers to end the quarter at 7.61 million Dish TV subs.
