Sling TV is getting native support for the Amazon Echo Show line of smart displays, which should give the No. 3 streaming service a decent leg up.<\/b>
\nTucked away amid Amazon\u2019s myriad announcements on Tuesday \u2014 between the cameras and the robots and the excellent-looking Echo 15 \u2014 was a small but not insignificant item: Sling TV is coming to Amazon Echo Show. That\u2019s a big deal for a few reasons. First is that there are a lot of Amazon Echo Show devices out there. How many, we don\u2019t know for sure. But it\u2019s certainly a nonzero number, from the Echo Show 5 at $85, all the way up to the Echo Show 10 at $250. Smart displays aren\u2019t getting any less popular with time, and Amazon makes some excellent ones. It\u2019s a big deal in terms of competition in the livestreaming television space. Hulu With Live TV, which is the most popular livestreaming service with 3.7 million paid subscribers, has been available on Echo Show for some time as part of the native Hulu integration. But that\u2019s been it. No YouTube TV, with its more than 3 million subscribers. And until now, no Sling TV. And it goes without saying that the new integration will be a boon to Sling TV itself, which had sort of plodded along at the mid-2-million subscriber mark before reaching a high of 2.686 million subscribers in the fall of 2019 and then dropping to its current level of 2.439 million subscribers. What none of that changes is that there\u2019s still a bit of a barrier to entry when it comes to live TV streaming services on products like an Echo Show \u2014 and its competitors, for that matter. First you have to set up the device itself via the Amazon Alexa app. That\u2019s pretty straightforward these days. But then you also have to have your account for Sling TV (or Hulu or whatever), and then connect the two. It\u2019s not difficult or in any way insurmountable, but it\u2019s definitely not as seamless as it is to watch YouTube TV on a Nest Home display. In other words, both Amazon and Sling TV can definitely take advantage of each other here. Sling TV sports two tracks of channels \u2014 Sling Orange and Sling Blue. Each costs $35 a month, or $50 if you get both together. From there, you\u2019ll build out your streaming plan with \u201cExtras,\u201d which add additional channels onto your bundle. It\u2019s not quite \u00e0 la carte TV, but it\u2019s as close as you can get to it.<\/p>\n