In Dish’s fourth-quarter earnings call held today, a representative mentioned a very interesting point. The company is aware that because there is no contract involved with the service that people will take advantage of the ability to sign up and drop to fit certain needs. A customer may sign up, say at the beginning of College Football Season and drop off in January. Or that people may sign up just in time for the NCAA Tournament in March.
It was even pointed out that because of the nature of promotions across multiple services it was possible that there are people who never pay for TV at all because they jump from one streaming service to another taking advantage of free month promotions and such. I used to do the same thing with Internet providers back in the days of the installation CD’s and dial-up modems.
Users should expect that sort of promotion to end at some point as the market for such services matures. You might notice that cell phones don’t have long free periods. At this point though, companies are still trying to get people used to the idea that they can watch TV via the Internet and apps.
The thrust of the call today was that Sling TV has shown tremendous growth this past year and now stands at over 2 million subscribers. In the past Dish has combined Sling TV subscribers with Dish subscribers. Much in the same way the CBS combines Showtime subs with CBS All Access subs. Maybe the 2.212 million is enough to show the success of the program. We look forward to finding out what the numbers really look like for Sling’s competitors.
