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
Chris Welch / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
This is Dish's second straight price increase on Sling TV: after the 2018 hike that took the core package from $20 to $25, both Orange and Blue now land at $30/month. The offset this time is structural rather than promotional — every subscriber gets 10 hours of cloud DVR included, a feature that until now sat behind a $5/month paid tier for 50 hours on iOS and Windows 10.
First-order effects
- Existing Sling TV subscribers on Orange or Blue pay $5 more per month starting with this change, but gain 10 hours of cloud DVR storage and additional channels at no extra charge — effectively converting a paid add-on into a base-tier feature.
Second-order effects
- The bundle-and-raise move is a direct response to the churn pressure visible in the subscriber data: Sling grew to 2.21M subscribers by late 2017, but the Q4 2019 report showing its first-ever subscriber loss frames why Dish is trading margin for retention features rather than raising price alone.
Third-order effects
- If the raise-then-bundle cycle repeats, streaming live TV keeps converging toward the cable bundle's cost structure, eroding the price gap that was Sling's original reason to exist since the DishWorld rebrand established the international-channel template in 2015.
The trend: Live-TV streaming services are ratcheting base prices upward while folding formerly paid features like cloud DVR into the base tier to slow subscriber churn.