In a sea of pricey live TV streaming services, Sling TV stands as a beacon of orange and blue light. Sling TV offers its primary packages, Sling Orange and Sling Blue, at $40/month each, which is half of what many leading live TV options like DirecTV and Hulu with Live TV have as their monthly price. The Orange plan offers 35 total channels, with exclusives like ESPN channels and Disney Channel; while Blue offers 42 total channels, with exclusives like FOX News Channel, USA, and SyFy (and 24 shared channels between the 2 plans).
But Sling TV boasts the ability to have a customizable, flexible lineup as among their biggest strengths. With that, they offer much in the way of Extras—bundles of channels you can purchase on top of your Orange or Blue package depending on your interests. In this article, we take a look specifically at their Sports, Kids, and News Extras and determine if any of them are worth getting. (Note that the Extras have slight variations between Orange and Blue.)
Sports Extra
For an extra $11/month, you can access Sports Extra (bringing your monthly total to $51). This bundle gives you 12 channels (Orange) or 10 channels (Blue), including: beIN Sports, NBA TV, MLB Network, and NHL Network, among others.
For $51, a sports fan that signed up for Sling Orange would have had access to 6 ESPN channels, as well as basketball, baseball, hockey, tennis, and college sports content. For its price, and compared to competitors that offer something similar for about $20-$30 higher, Sling TV with a Sports Extra is worth it.
Kids Extra
For an extra $6/month, you can access Kids Extra (bringing your monthly total to $46). This bundle gives you 6 channels (Orange) or 4 channels (Blue), namely: Nicktoons, TeenNick, Boomerang, BabyTV, and Orange-exclusives Disney Jr and Disney XD.
On the one hand, you could go, ‘What’s another $6, you’re already signing up.’ And you’ve got little children running around. And maybe it’s your first month, so your total’s even cheaper. But on the other hand, it is $6. Which will go to channels that, let’s face it, aren’t worth seeking for an adult, let alone a child. Orange offers Disney Channel, Blue offers National Geographic, and both offer Cartoon Network and Nick Jr; you don’t have to spend $6 on Kids Extra. Perhaps, an even cheaper alternative is Philo, which carries no Disney, but does have Nick Jr., Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, TeenNick, Animal Planet, and Discovery Family, all for $28/month.
News Extra
For an extra $6/month, you can access News Extra (also bringing your monthly total to $46). This bundle gives you 8 channels (Orange) or 10 channels (Blue), including BBC World News, NewsNation, and Law&Crime. The base Blue package offers news channel exclusives in Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and HLN, on top of the CNN, BBC America, and Bloomberg TV+ lineup that both plans share.
It would be reasonable to feel that the base lineup is limited if you value having variety in your news channels. So, for the price of $6/month, the News Extra has value as an add-on.
In Sum
Sling TV is one of the most affordable live TV streaming services in the market, offering each of their base packages for a friendly $40/month. They also give you many options for Extra bundles that go for as low as $6/month to keep your channel lineup customizable and flexible, perhaps banking on the hope that with the affordable base price, you’d get multiple cheap Extras, like adding little sides to a food delivery. But if you wanted to keep your budget as close to $40-$50 as possible, the Sports and News Extras are the most worth it for the amount of channels you get for cheap.