Dish relegates sports channels to an add-on

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Dish Network is offering a new “skinny” bundle of about 50 cable channels that doesn’t include ESPN and some other sports channels, giving people who don’t care about sports a way to save money on TV without joining the ranks of “cord cutters.”

Sports channels are among the most expensive for cable and satellite TV companies and are usually included in big cable bundles. That drives up the bill for all customers, whether they enjoy watching ball games or not.

Dish’s new “Flex Pack” starts at $30 a month, not including fees and taxes, while a big cable bundle typically costs about $90.

Dish is not the first cable distributor to sell a smaller basic cable bundle without ESPN, however.

Comcast has done so for nearly a decade. And Dish’s package is similar to Verizon Fios’ “Custom TV” when it launched in April 2015. Verizon also made ESPN (and lots of other channels) add-ons to a smaller cable bundle. Then ESPN sued and other programmers protested. Custom TV was revamped in February to two core bundles, one sports-focused and one not, with fewer options for groups of channels to add.

Custom TV has “been diluted pretty badly” since those changes, said Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson Research. Verizon spokesman Ray McConville says the revised version of Custom TV is more popular and changes were made in response to customer feedback rather than programmer demands. Verizon settled with ESPN in May.

Dish has “a good relationship with ESPN” and let all the programmers know about the new package, said Warren Schlichting, the Englewood, Colo., company’s executive vice president of marketing, programming and media sales. It “takes cooperation on both sides,” he said.