Sling TV price hike raises streaming service’s cost by $5 a month

One of the cheapest live TV streaming services is becoming a bit more expensive this month after Dish announced a price hike coming to its Sling TV service.

The price hike - which goes into effect Monday, December 23 - will raise the price of the Sling TV Blue and Sling TV Orange basic packages to $30 per month from their previous price of $25 per month. (Sling TV Blue, remember includes Fox, NBC and sports options, while Sling TV Orange includes Disney channels plus ESPN.)

The package that combines both services that was previously available for $40 will now be $45 per month under the new pricing structure, which will start appearing on customers’ bills in January.

To compensate for the increased price, Sling TV says that it will add Fox News and MSNBC as well as HLN from CNN to both packages, plus 10 hours of Cloud DVR Free service that will now be available to every subscriber.

A bad year for live TV streaming

While this is disappointing news for subscribers of Sling TV, it’s pretty much par for the course for live TV streaming services at this point - most other live TV streaming services like Hulu and YouTube TV either raised prices this year or, in the case of PlayStation Vue, announced that they’d be closing down for good.

So why is everyone raising prices?

The cost of making deals with multiple stakeholders like Fox/Disney, Viacom and NBCUniversal has gone up most likely up in the past year now that everyone is trying to create services of their own. (Of the three aforementioned major players, Disney just released a streaming service of its own called Disney Plus, Viacom owns Pluto TV and NBCUniversal will likely launch its cord-cutting service, Peacock, early next year.)

Hopefully, what we’re seeing right now is the painful growth of live TV services that will come before the next big growth spurt in 2020 - though the exact fate of live TV services right now is anyone's guess.

Via Variety