In head-scratching TV news, Sling TV announced plans Tuesday to offer its internet TV service to Comcast users on the cable provider’s X1 platform. Launch dates were not announced.
But Sling’s parent, Dish Network, doesn’t even offer Sling to its customers. Since Sling’s launch in early 2015, Dish has said Sling and Dish subscribers were different types of consumers.
“Sling TV has always been committed to supporting the devices people are already using. The X1 platform is the latest to be added to the Sling TV supported device lineup, which already includes televisions, tablets, game consoles, computers, smartphones and streaming devices,” Sling TV spokeswoman Chelsea Satkowiak said in an e-mail.
The key here may also be Sling’s , that was added a few months after Sling’s launch. — known in a previous life as DishWorld — has more than 280 channels in 20 languages that can be added as a variety of tiers for Sling customers. Multicultural tiers start at $10 a month.
Comcast’s general manager of multicultural services Javier Garcia said in a statement that “the addition of Sling TV’s multicultural programming will be an excellent complement to the existing international offerings on X1 and will be attractive to our customers.”
The two pay-TV rivals had been losing subscribers in recent years. But while Comcast turned that downward trend around — in the third quarter — Dish has continued to see heavy losses. In Dish’s most recent quarter, it lost 116,000 net pay-TV subscribers, even as the satellite TV provider began offering existing customers local TV channels.Dish launched Sling TV last year to appeal to customers who were tired of large TV bills with too many channels they don’t watch. Sling began by offering 20 channels, including Food Networks and ESPN, for $20 a month.
According to MoffettNathanson senior research analyst Craig Moffett, Sling TV is growing and has helped Dish offset some of those losses. Moffett estimated that Sling during the third quarter and now has 1.08 million customers.
