What you need to know
- If you only have Sling Orange, the cost of Sports Extra is going up to $10 a month.
- Sling Blue customers won't be affected, nor will those with both plans.
- Current Sling Orange customers are grandfathered for a month.
Sling TV — which remains the most popular live streaming TV service in the United States — just did something that might make it just a tad less popular. It's raising the price of its Sports Extra package to $10 a month — but only for some folks.
Who are those folks, exactly, and why do we keep calling them "folks?" The latter remains a mystery. But the former are those who have been subscribed only to the Sling Orange plan, which costs $25 a month on its own. That's who will be paying a little bit more going forward. (New customers get hit with the increase now — existing customers will see the new charges on their first bill after Aug. 1.)
If you've had the Sling Blue plan by itself, or have subscribed to both the Sling Orange and Blue plans, you've already been paying $10 a month for the Sports Extra.
What's the reason for the change? Unsurprisingly, Sling says programming fees keep going up.
Here's the words straight from the horse's mouth:
If you subscribe to Sling Orange and Sports Extra, you will receive an email notifying you that the price of Sports Extra is now $10 per month. Since launching Sports Extra as part of our initial offering in 2015, we have added popular channels to the Sports Extra, including MLB Network, NHL Network, NBA TV and more. Our team is working hard every day to keep prices as low as possible, but sports programming fees continue to rise.Starting today, the price of Sports Extra for new Sling Orange customers will be $10. Current customers will see the updated price reflected on their bill beginning on Aug. 1, 2019.The price of Sports Extra will remain unchanged at $10 per month for Sling Blue customers, as well as customers who subscribe to both Sling Orange and Sling Blue services.
The news isn't all bad, though. To help soften things a bit, Sling also is rolling out a new "Total TV Deal" that'll get you seven Sling TV Extras and 50 hours of DVR for $20 a month. Those extras include:
- Sports Extra
- Kids Extra
- News Extra
- Lifestyle Extra
- Heartland Extra
- Hollywood Extra
- Comedy Extra
- Cloud DVR
Sling says that deal is more than half of what you'd have to pay to get all those Extras separately. So that's not a bad thing.
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