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This story is part of CES 2016. Our editors bring you complete CES 2016 coverage and scour the showroom floor for the hottest new tech gadgets around.
When Dish Networks announced its low-cost live TV service in January 2015, it shared a simple plan: to convince millenials and other cord cutters, unwilling to pay hefty monthly fees for traditional TV services, to become Sling TV customers instead.
A year later, Dish and its Sling TV division will step on to the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas again and likely announce enhancements to the $20-a-month Internet TV service. Whatever they serve up, including additions to Sling TV’s lineup of 23 live channels, the plan remains the same: to convince people to sign up.
Dish needs to do that convincing because its satellite pay TV service keeps losing customers. During the third quarter, Dish shed about 23,000 subscribers, nearly twice as many as the 12,000 who signed off in the same period a year earlier. Still, analysts say that number could have been much worse it if weren’t for Sling TV. While Dish doesn’t break out how many Internet TV customers it’s signed up, analyst Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson estimates there were nearly 400,000 Sling TV customers at the end of September, up from 169,000 in March.
Dish executives have already said they’re working on improvements for Sling TV. During the company’s third-quarter earnings call in November, CEO Charlie Ergen said features such as targeted ads and support for multiple streams — so you can have more than one device sign into an account and watch TV at the same time — “would be positives to consumers and…we’ll design Sling for all those things.”
Ergen also said to expect new deals with content providers. Sling TV base subscribers have access to programming from AMC, ESPN, Food Network, CNN, the Disney Channel, Lifetime and ABC Family, among others. Add-on packs of kids, sports, news and other channels are available for additional fees starting at $5 each a month.
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