So CES is happening in Vegas this week and my Twitter feed is an absolute garbage fire of "smart" everything. A belt that tightens and loosens itself depending on how much you ate at lunch (its called Belty, I am not making that up). A toothbrush that syncs to an app so you can, I guess, relive your brushing performance later. Somebody demoed a car that parks itself using an Android smartwatch: you stand outside the car, tap your wrist, and a BMW i3 backs itself into a spot at Mandalay Bay while nobody is in the drivers seat. Thats genuinely cool and also exactly the kind of thing that will be a $3,000 dealer option on a 3-series in six years and never make it near anything I can afford.
But the one thing out of this whole circus that actually made me sit up was Dish Networks announcement on Monday: Sling TV. Twenty dollars a month, no contract, no cable box, and you get a real live channel lineup over the internet. ESPN and ESPN2 are in there, which is the part that surprised me most, because ESPN has spent years acting like it would rather set its cable bundle money on fire than let anyone watch the network without a full pay-TV subscription attached. TNT, TBS, Food Network, HGTV, CNN, Disney Channel, ABC Family, its not everything, but its a real lineup, not some janky bundle of channels nobody watches.
I've been paying Comcast $94 a month for a while now for channels I mostly ignore so I can get to the six or seven I actually watch, plus a DVR box that reboots itself at random for no reason I've ever been able to figure out. Every time I call to complain they offer me a "loyalty discount" for six months and then quietly bump the price back up, and I always forget to call back and fight it, so I just keep paying. Twenty bucks a month for ESPN alone would almost break even against what I'm burning on the sports tier I never asked for.
The catch, and there's obviously a catch, is that this is Dish basically negotiating one specific deal with Disney/ESPN to unbundle a single network from the wall of cable and I don't know if that deal happens again with anyone else anytime soon. Cable companies have spent decades building a system where you cant get channel 34 without also paying for forty channels of shopping networks and static, and one company doing this once doesn't mean the dam breaks. It might just mean Dish needed a way to get non-cable customers watching something, and ESPN needed a way into houses that already cut the cord. I dont think this kills cable this year. I dont even think it kills it in three years. But its the first crack Ive actually seen in that wall that wasnt just some startup promising things it couldn't deliver.
Worth saying too: this is launching on the Dish Network anytime channel guide model but delivered over an app, so early reports are it'll run on Roku first, which is a smart call given how many Roku boxes are already sitting under TVs in this country. No cable box means no truck roll, no installer standing in your living room for four hours, none of that.
Im going to actually try this when it launches later this month if it launches on schedule, mostly out of spite toward my current cable bill honestly. I've said for two years now that Id cut the cord the second I could get live sports without the bundle, and this is the closest anyone's come to calling that bluff. Ill report back once I've actually used it instead of just read a press release about it, because press release Sling TV and actual-buffering-during-the-fourth-quarter Sling TV are probably two different products.
Everything else out of CES this week I'm mostly tuning out. The smart home stuff is the same pitch it was in 2013 and 2014 — connect your lightbulbs to your phone, connect your thermostat to your phone, connect your refrigerator to your phone — and none of it has actually changed how anyone lives yet. Twenty dollars for ESPN without a cable box is the first thing out of this show that I'd hand my own money over for right now, not eventually, not in some hypothetical smart-home future. Now.