Dish's Sling TV to add AMC, which carries “Mad Men” and “The Walking Dead”, to $20 basic package
Peter Kafka / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
Dish's Sling TV has been assembling its thin bundle piece by piece: weeks after announcing an HBO add-on at $15/month through a Dish-Turner distribution deal, it is pulling AMC — home of "Mad Men" and "The Walking Dead" — directly into the $20 base package. That matters because AMC was the kind of prestige network cord-cutters previously had no legal way to buy without a full pay-TV subscription.
First-order effects
- Cord-cutters on Sling TV's $20 tier get AMC's marquee shows live for the first time, removing one of the clearest remaining reasons to keep a cable subscription.
- AMC Networks gains a new distribution outlet and per-subscriber revenue from a growing over-the-top audience it could not previously monetize outside traditional carriage deals.
Second-order effects
- Other cable networks now face pressure to follow AMC into cheap OTT bundles rather than hold out for full-fat carriage fees, accelerating the shift of licensing leverage toward aggregators like Dish.
- AMC Networks' answer two years later — a reported commercial-free streaming service priced around $4.99-$6.99/month for existing cable subscribers — shows networks hedging by selling direct even as they wholesale into bundles like Sling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, networks end up double-dipping across thin bundles and their own apps while the bundle itself creeps upward — Sling's packages rose from $20 to $30/month by late 2019 — narrowing the price gap that made cord-cutting compelling in the first place.
The trend: Prestige cable networks are moving from exclusive pay-TV carriage into layered distribution — OTT base bundles plus direct-to-consumer apps — with bundle prices drifting back toward cable levels.