Sling TV Faces Another Lawsuit Over Short-Term Passes, This Time from Warner Bros. Discovery

Looks like the same companies who teamed up to form Venu (only to give up when sued by Fubo) are now joining forces to sue Sling TV.

Warner Bros. Discovery is suing Sling over their short-term streaming passes.

Disney and ESPN filed their lawsuit over Sling’s passes a few days ago.

What’s the Problem With Sling TV’s Short-Term Passes?

For consumers, Sling’s innovation is pretty great. The new plan gives users the option to watch TV for one day ($4.99), one weekend ($9.99), or one week ($14.99).

According to WBD’s filing, Sling’s parent company signed an agreement that these TV channels must be “distributed as part of a subscription service. This is because programmers depend on monthly subscriptions to finance, acquire, develop, produce, and program hundreds of different programs for their 24/7 network programming.”

Warner Bros. Discovery claims the company launched the passes “without consulting or even notifying programmers.”

Maybe Sling violated their agreement with channel providers, maybe they didn’t. The court will decide. But I’ve got to throw a flag on something here.

WBD suggesting that they need to “finance, acquire, develop, produce, and program hundreds of different programs” runs contrary to what TV viewers are actually experiencing. When you program a TV channel with wall-to-wall reruns, we shouldn’t be expected to pay ever-increasing prices for that old junk.

Speaking of Warner Bros. Discovery’s channels, tonight’s TLC schedule literally has 6 straight hours of “90 Day Fiancé.” TNT started the day with 4 straight hours of “Charmed” and 6 straight hours of “Supernatural.” You want us to pay for a full month of that?

Sling’s short-term passes are an acknowledgment that there is very little live TV worth paying for. If you’re a sports fan, you’re trapped paying a full month, even if you only watch football on the weekends. Of course, the TV networks are paying astronomical amounts for sports rights, so it makes sense they want a return on their investment.

But it stinks that a channel like ESPN costs distributors $9.42 per viewer per month, and when they sell it directly to us, it’s $29.99/month.

The economics of live TV don’t really work anymore.

• TV viewers are only really tuning in for sports.
• Sports leagues know this and enjoy ferocious bidding wars by TV channel owners.
• Those channel owners are now out of money, so they don’t invest in any other programming.
• The channel owners gouge the cable companies and streaming services that carry them.
• Cable and streaming companies pass the price along to their viewers.
• Frustrated viewers get sick of paying and abandon pay TV altogether.

So when the next round of sports rights come up for negotiation, channels are desperate to get the only people still willing to pay for television: sports fans.

Against this backdrop, you have to admire a service like Frndly TV, which just gives up on sports and says, “You know what? TV shouldn’t cost more than $10/month.

Regardless of how these legal fights play out, expect Sling to be in some serious trouble when carriage negotiations pick up at the end of their contract.