Dish raising prices

With the focus here on streaming, it may seem out of place that I'm commenting on an increase in prices for a satellite service.

No, I'm not going to turn that news into another reason to go with streaming rather than satellite or cable. I think there are plenty of reasons to stream over usage of those older, traditional services.

And, yes, those older pay TV services do go up in price from time to time, but so do streaming services. So, a price increase in a satellite service isn't exactly a new reason to switch.

Rather, I think it's a sign of things to come with streaming. The reason is that this price increase that was announced last week is for Dish Network. And that impacts streaming because Dish owns Sling TV.

You may already know that Dish owns Sling, but not everyone knows that. Yes, traditional pay TV services are in the streaming business as well. Comcast, one of the largest cable TV services, owns Peacock TV, the streaming service. And of course satellite TV service DirecTV owns DirecTV Stream.

But back to Dish. The company announced last week that prices will be going up in November:

At DISH, we continue to invest in your service and technology to make improvements and provide you with the best TV viewing experience at the best value. However, the price that we pay for programming continues to rise. In fact, the fastest growing cost we and all other TV providers have is driven by the cost we pay the programmers. We will continue to work hard for fair deals with these programmers to keep channel costs and the price you pay as low as possible. Unfortunately, you may have observed some channel interruptions because of this.

Due to these rising costs, we will be increasing the cost of our package offerings beginning 11/17/22.

This is bad news for streamers. That bit about "channel interruptions?" One of those happened recently, and impacted Dish ... and Sling TV.

So, with Dish raising its prices, I'm expecting Dish to do the same, as the settling of that outage led to the price increase for the satellite TV service, and the same company owns Sling, who was impacted as well.

Could Sling go without a price increase? Sure. But I expect Sling TV will up prices soon. And people will get mad at Sling TV, when they should get mad at Disney instead. After all, if there is a price hike in your Streaming Life soon, House of Mouse would be to blame.