Sling subscriber cap

Off Topic
1

“Sling is by its agreements with the content owners itself limited to be sold to people that don’t have cable, with a limit of 2 million subscribers,” Discovery CEO David Zaslav

http://adage.com/article/media/tv-programmers-put-subscriber-caps-skinny-bundles/297887/

2

Very interesting.  It doesn’t sound like Sling is that close to getting there (they have more than 100,000 is all it says), but if it keeps getting popular, the limit could be an issue.   

3

Only 2 million when the U.S. population is 320 million. That’s a bit ridiculous.

4

And 100,000?  Hopefully that’s just a number.  That number means SlingTV was a failure folks (at least so far).  That number probably needs to reach at least 1 million for them to break even (even then I doubt it).  We’ll see…

Is cordcutting just not that popular?  Or are people (like me) satisfied enough with OTA, Netflix, Amazon Prime and/or Hulu?

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I am happy with OTA and Netflix. Screw Sling TV lol

6

So no one at Sling has verified any of this and I was never asked if I have cable or any other kind of service when I signed up. Did Rolling Stone write this article?

7

I suspect some cord cutters objected to paying for 400 stations when they were interested in 3 or 4. Doesn’t Sling TV essentially do the same thing - but on a smaller scale? It does not offer stations a la carte. I would have to get and pay for all the Sling stations even if I only want ESPN. So for many of us, Sling is just another embodiment of what motivated us to cut the cord in the first place.

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@jdoe, Sling does offer different packages though.  As a sports fan, the $5 extra for all the ESPNs and SEC Network channels is well worth it.  If you are a movie lover, the movie package may be worthwhile.  If you have little kids, the kids package looks good.


Sling is a pretty amazing deal.  I was willing to pay $25 month when it first came out, and now I have even more channels for no additional cost.   I watch more SlingTv than I do Tablo, for what its worth.
9

Sling would be perfect for me if there was a way to dump ESPN all together and perhaps substitute something I would actually like to watch in it’s place for the base package.

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Only 2 million when the U.S. population is 320 million. That's a bit ridiculous.

123M households in the US, so they’re saying just over 1.6% all US households.  To put that in to perspective, Comcast has 21.7M video subscribers ( http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/the-comcast-time-warner-deal-by-the-numbers/?_r=0  ) and after the merger with TWC will be closer to 30M.  2M subscribers is a pretty significant size for pay-TV service.

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@virtualuk, 2 million doesn’t necessarily bug me (though does seem arbitrarily constrained… again wreaks of “cable company”)… but that “at least 100,000” subscribers IMHO really needs to be a much higher number for SlingTV to succeed (or last very long).  Could just be a “number” though… not really accurate (?).

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Here is where the 100,000 number came from: http://recode.net/2015/03/05/sling-tvs-web-tv-service-attracts-at-least-100000-sign-ups-in-its-first-month/


Since now it has been 2 months, I imagine the number is at least twice that.   With the Final Four seminfinals on TBS and not CBS, Sling likely had an increase in subscribers this past month.
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The nice thing about sling is you can cancel/restart online and don’t have to deal with idiots that want to talk to you about it first :stuck_out_tongue:


So I am guessing that number is always in flux on a month to month basis
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 but that "at least 100,000" subscribers IMHO really needs to be a much higher number for SlingTV to succeed (or last very long). 

Not sure I agree about 100K being needing to be much higher to succeed or last very long.  If you look at the US cable operator market, by the time you get to #20 in the list you're around the 160K subscriber mark.  There are a couple of hundred smaller cable operators believe it or not in the US.  Having between 100K-200K subscribers isn't shabby by regular pay-TV standards.  Sure they're no Comcast/TWC, but definitely capable of being a viable, profitable business especially seeing as they're not paying for the delivery infrastructure (i.e. fiber to the home, head ends, STBs, etc.) :-)
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@virtualuk, but you know… those smaller guys aren’t trying to pull off what SlingTV is trying to do.  But point taken.  And subscription and rebroadcast licensing fees vary from area to area and provider to provider…

It’s very possible that more SlingTV-like entities (e.g. what Apple is trying right now) may show up… and then it could gain enough momentum to “change the world” so to speak (especially if you consider that non-cordcutters will become cord cutters if Apple just tells them so… just one of those weird Apple things).

I wonder what others things we could change if we simply got Apple to put “the issue” in an aluminum body of some kind and tell people they need to “do it”??  (end slavery, end violence against women, etc.)



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Isn’t SlingTV a division of Dish Network?  I think that means that SlingTV wouldn’t necessarily need to survive on its own as a small provider, rather it is one piece of a larger company.  That would also mean that Dish could in theory leverage its larger market position for higher carriage fees, would it not?