Sling TV Reportedly Getting HBO Access

What you don’t see is Tyrion watching Sling on a phone hidden in the bottom of that dish.

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]

by Chris Morran via Consumerist