Warner Bros. Discovery’s Discovery+ streaming service is now available as a premium add-on for Sling TV customers, expanding to Dish TV customers later this month.
Users of Sling TV, Dish’s virtual MVPD live streaming TV service, can sign up and access Discovery+ content starting today, while Dish TV satellite customers can do the same starting August 25.
Discovery+ costs about $5 per month with ads or just under $7 per month for a commercial-free subscription following a 7-day free trial.
The new integration means Dish streaming and linear customers can get access to 70,000 episodes of content including original series and on-demand programming focused on reality and non-fiction titles such as “Fixer Upper: Welcome Home,” “Hillsong: A Megachurch Exposed,” and “Conjuring Kesha.”
“Providing our customers with the best entertainment experience has always been our number one priority at Dish and Sling,” said Gary Schanman, group president of Sling TV, in a statement. “The addition of discovery+ on our platforms offers iconic and acclaimed content for the a la carte experience our customers love.”
Discovery+ includes content from a portfolio of networks such as HGTV, Food Network, TLC, ID, Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and Magnolia Network, as well as non-fiction programming from A&E, History Channel and Lifetime.
Schanman, who stepped into his new role at Sling in April, added that Sling TV offers more than 50 premium a la carte add-on services to help users customize the viewing experience “all within a single account login so they can easily manage their services in one place.”
In another recent move to expand streaming content options, last month Sling TV and Dish TV were among platforms to offer TelevisaUnivision’s new ad-free Spanish-language subscription service ViX+. And on the easing bundling and managing subscriptions front, Sling TV earlier this year became the first streamer to integrate billing with MyBundle.TV – allowing customers to sign up and pay for Sling right from the platform.
There was no mention of what the Discovery+ partnership with Dish will look like, or if it will continue, once WBD combines the Discovery+ and HBO Max streaming services into one platform under a single brand. That move was detailed last week during quarterly earnings, with an expected U.S. launch of the new service in the summer of 2023.
Adding more content to its TV platforms follows Dish Networks’ second quarter earnings, where it disclosed losing 257,000 net video subscribers – including 202,000 satellite and 55,00 Sling TV subscribers. The Dish TV subscriber base now stands at 7.79 million while Sling TV has a base of 2.19 million.
As for broadening distribution of Discovery+, the ad-supported version came to The Roku Channel in May as a premium subscription partner.