By Shalini Ramachandran 

Sling TV is making it official: the streaming service is going after cord-cutters.

Until now, executives at Dish Network Corp., the satellite TV provider that owns Sling TV, have largely insisted that the $20-a-month streaming service targets "cord-nevers" -- younger consumers who have never signed up for a pay TV subscription.

That message was aimed at reassuring big TV companies who were nervous about licensing just a few of their channels to Sling TV, rather than their full suite of networks. Part of the concern was that supporting Sling TV's slimmed-down, cheaper streaming bundle would encourage more people to "cut the cord," meaning cancel their traditional pay TV subscriptions, which are still the backbone of the TV ecosystem.

Now Sling TV executives say they are pulling out all the stops in a multimillion-dollar campaign aimed at attracting those cord-cutters.

The nationwide ad campaign, which will run across TV, digital, print, and social channels, features "Machete" star Danny Trejo growling about how "evil" and "scary" cable TV companies are, with their long-term contracts and pricing lures that make you end up paying more than $100 a month.

In the ad, Sling TV compares those pain points with its low price, no hidden fees and no long-term contracts -- effectively encouraging disgruntled cable subscribers to cut the cord and sign up.

Sling TV Chief Executive Roger Lynch's pitch is that the streaming service will give a place for fed-up cable customers to go where they can still pay to watch a selection of TV channels, as opposed to leave the ecosystem entirely.

"We're not creating sentiment; we're reflecting that it is the growing percentage of the market," said Sling TV Chief Marketing Officer Glenn Eisen. The idea with the campaign is to "ratchet up the tone" against traditional pay TV, he said.

Sling TV's biggest programming partners, including ESPN's majority-owner Walt Disney Co., have been under pressure from investors due to increased worries about subscriber losses as more consumers downgrade to skinnier bundles of channels.

In the past few months, Sling TV has grown its content offerings, signing up programmers like the NFL Network, NBCUniversal and 21st Century Fox, and has begun offering a $25-a-month tier allowing people to watch multiple streams simultaneously, an upgrade from its original single-stream service. Mr. Lynch said recent moves from wireless carriers like Sprint and T-Mobile to drum up unlimited data plans were another encouraging factor, given that one-third of Sling TV's unique viewers a week watch using a mobile phone.

The campaign may also be a move of necessity. Dish doesn't break out Sling TV customers from its traditional satellite TV subscribers. But even with the benefit of Sling TV growth, Dish lost 304,000 subscribers in the first half of this year, compared with a loss of 46,000 during the same period a year ago.

When Sling TV launched in early 2015, Mr. Lynch said, the addressable market was 21 million homes -- 16 million cord-nevers and 5 million people who had cut the cord over the prior few years. He said both groups are "certainly growing."

"Millennials watch fewer hours of traditional TV a day," Mr. Lynch said. "We expect that to continue."

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com

 

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 30, 2016 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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