Sling TV Users Getting HBO Access For $15/Month In Time For Game Of Thrones
What you don’t see is Tyrion watching Sling on a phone hidden in the bottom of that dish.
According to Sling, the channel will launch on the streaming service in advance of the April 12 premier of Game of Thrones on HBO.
It looks like Sling users will only get access to one live stream of HBO, so no HBO2, HBO Comedy, HBO Zone, or any of the other affiliated channels most pay-TV subscribers get with their package. Howevever, Sling says that users will get the “same extensive [on-demand] library HBO provides on its other platforms,” which seems to imply that this is effectively like having HBO Go, but through Sling.
The $15/month rate is the same price that Apple will charge for access to its standalone HBO Now streaming service when that launches this month. However, that service doesn’t require a pay-TV subscription while Sling’s HBO access requires you have the core $20/month suite of channels.
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Until now, Dish’s recently launched Sling TV streaming service only offered a package of EPIX channels for users looking to access premium commercial-free movies. But a new report claims that Sling will soon get HBO thanks to a new deal between Time Warner and Dish.
This is according to the Wall Street Journal, which says that a past-deadline deal was reached last night between the satellite service and the media giant (not to be confused with Time Warner Cable, which was spun off into its own business years ago) that keeps channels like TBS and TNT on Dish, and would give Sling users the ability to subscribe to HBO through the service.
What’s unclear is whether this reported deal would be for live access to HBO (and if so, is it just HBO or HBO and affiliated channels? And what about Cinemax?), or for online on-demand access through the likes of HBO Go or the soon-to-launch HBO Now. The Journal’s sources say that while Dish now has the right to sell subscriptions to the HBO Now standalone service (which doesn’t require any sort of pay-TV subscription), it is unlikely it will do so when it kicks off next month.
Time Warner’s Turner division has been a big part of Sling since it launched nationally in February, with CNN, TBS, TNT, the Cartoon Network and others already available for streaming live on Sling.
[via BGR]
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