Dish increases price of both Sling TV packages, Orange and Blue, by $5 to $30/month, gives all users 10 hours of cloud-based DVR storage and additional channels
The cheap days of Sling TV are over — The cheap days of Sling TV are over. Dish's internet TV service is raising the price …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Sling TV's second core-price increase in eighteen months: Dish already raised the core package to $25 a month in mid-2018, and the new move takes both Orange and Blue to $30. What was pitched at launch as the cheap alternative to cable is now two hikes deep.
The offset is telling: cloud DVR used to be an upsell — Sling charged $5 a month for 50 hours of storage on iOS and Windows 10 — and Dish is now folding 10 free hours plus additional channels into the base price. That reads like a service repositioning from budget pick to full-priced bundle, arriving just before Sling posts its first quarterly subscriber loss since launch.
First-order effects
- Every Sling Orange and Blue subscriber pays $5 more per month starting with this change, while gaining 10 hours of cloud DVR and extra channels they previously had to buy separately or go without.
Second-order effects
- Bundling DVR into the base package undercuts Sling's own paid storage tier, pushing Dish to compete on bundle value rather than à-la-carte add-ons; the added channels also raise the content cost baked into each $30 subscription.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, internet TV services converge on cable-style pricing, eroding the value gap that drove cord-cutting in the first place — and the subsequent subscriber dip suggests price sensitivity among exactly the customers these services were built for.
The trend: Live-TV streaming services are ratcheting prices toward traditional pay-TV levels, trading their budget positioning for bundle breadth and testing how much cheaper-than-cable loyalty survives.