Sling Passes Could Significantly Disrupt US TV Market: Analyst
Sling's TV day pass "has the potential to be all sorts of disruptive" in the U.S. TV market, TVRev's Alan Wolk wrote Friday. Sling said last week that it's offering $1 day passes to its Orange basic plan for a limited time to celebrate Disney being denied a preliminary injunction against the short-term Sling Passes, which the streamer launched in August. In an order rejecting the injunction last week (docket 1:25-cv-07169), Judge Arun Subramanian of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York wrote that Disney hadn't shown a likelihood of success on the merits. He said it's not clear that the passes are violating the contract Sling has with Disney, as the language regarding subscribers doesn't give a minimum subscription length, and Disney hadn't shown irreparable harm to warrant a preliminary injunction against the passes offering. In addition, Subramanian said Disney failed to show that harms to its relationships with other distributors or its business model can't be remedied through money damages.
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Wolk said other streamers aren't likely to go the same route as Sling "unless ... they feel they have to" in the face of consumer demand. Orange includes ESPN and TNT, but not local broadcast stations, making the streaming plan "more PR hype than reality," he said. But "it’s opened a Pandora’s box of possibilities." One-day passes provide Sling with viewers' email and credit card numbers, which can be useful in marketing, Wolk noted.