Sports has been one of the last great hold-outs of cord cutting, but now a little progress is being made in the right direction—soon, you'll be able to get live sports without a cable subscription, too. Dish's new web TV service will let you stream ESPN for 20 bucks a month.
Re/code reports that Dish's new offering, dubbed Sling TV (coming soon), will also give you access to Food Network, CNN, and the Travel channel, among 10 channels for the flat rate of 20 dollars. Sling TV only works for one user at a time, so if you plan on handing out your password to your friends like you do with Netflix, well, that dog just won't hunt. This service is ideal for laptop or tablet watching. Although, you will be able to stream Sling TV to your actual TV, but you'd have to do that via a Web TV box, a la Fire TV or Roku (but not Apple TV, apparently).
We've said it before—as media companies have become to unfetter their most desirable of offerings (say HBO), a future of TV that doesn't require cable has started to look pretty attractive. That is, if you don't care about sports. And actually! This Dish plan is great if you are looking forward to a future where you're not shackled to a cable subscription. It adds up, but you could, at some point in 2015, get ESPN, HBO, Hulu, and Netflix, and be pretty good to go as far as your streaming needs are concerned. Throw in a digital antenna for your broadcast network needs, and you're all set. Like a TV set, get it? [Re/code]