When Dish Network last week announced its service called Sling TV, you’d have thought a grisly homicide had occurred.
“Did Dish Network Just Kill TV?” asked one posting on You Tube. “Dish’s New Sling TV Service Will Murder Traditional Pay TV,” was the headline on Venture Beat’s story. And PC magazine, not to be left out of the felonious theme, headlined its story thusly: “Dish Networks and Sling TV Could Finally Kill Cable.”
The common storyline of these and other accounts: Cable TV needs to be knocked off, the sooner and bloodier the better. Customers detest being forced to buy hundreds of channels when they mostly watch just a few. The faster we can get rid of cable with its bundled deals and move to an à la carte system, the better the world will be.
And Sling TV gets us closer to that bundle-free life, most of those writers opined. For $20 a month, you can get a dozen live channels that will include some limited libraries of shows. It will be delivered online, so you won’t need cable at all, although you’ll still need an Internet connection.
Sling is aimed primarily at today’s youthful cord cutters, those who eschew a traditional TV screen but patch together a personalized lineup of entertainment with Hulu Plus, Netflix, etc., and watch on their smartphones, tablets or laptops.
(In case you hadn’t noticed: TV sets are slipping into the dreaded realm of the uncool. I wrote last year that my then-12-year-old daughter asked to have the television taken out of her room. A friend might see it and make fun of her at school. Now that I think about it, my 30-year-old son doesn’t have or want a TV. It makes you wonder how long it will be before television sets are found principally in retirement communities.)
Cord cutters do miss one big thing: live sports. But the new Sling TV will include ESPN and ESPN2 in its package. That starts the ball rolling (and yes, the pun was intended) in separating sports from the lineup of cable channels. That’s why several writers last week thought Sling was particularly meaningful: If sports channels start getting pulled out, the old cable bundle may unravel quickly.
All this is important for Los Angeles, where many television shows are created and produced, because the looming television reality promises to be more challenging.
One analyst quoted in the Wall Street Journal estimated that unbundling would drain about half of the revenue out of the television industry, or about $70 billion. All those hundreds of channels would collapse to about 20, she opined.
You may not like the bundle, but it creates lots of jobs here. Frail cable channels are propped up by the sturdy ones. If we move to an à la carte system, many of those weaker channels will join “The Gale Storm Show” and “Car 54, Where Are You?” in television history.
I’m just speaking personally here, but I’ll miss the bundle. I kind of enjoy documentaries and history shows. But they’ve got small audiences and probably will be pushed under by channels with big audiences. According to this list I just looked up, the most popular channels include AMC and the Food Network (really?). I guess that means I’ll have to start watching “The Walking Dead” and “Worst Cooks in America.”
On second thought, maybe I’ll be a cord cutter instead.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
