Sling’s Streaming TV Service For Cord Cutters Now Runs On Amazon Tablets

Sling TV, the Dish-owned live TV service aimed at cord cutters – or those who never wanted to sign up for a traditional cable or satellite TV subscription in the first place – is today available on Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, including the Amazon Fire HD and HDX devices. This rounds out Sling’s already extensive device footprint, which also includes support for Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick as well as host of other platforms, such as iOS, Android, Mac, PC, Nexus Player, Roku, and Xbox One.

The service is now one of many offered by traditional pay TV providers as a way to tap into the growing number of viewers who prefer to stream television programming and movies to connected devices over the internet. Today, others including Comcast and Verizon (disclosure: TechCrunch parent) are also entering into the space with streaming TV services of their own.

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Dish finally gave some insight into how large its Sling TV service had grown during last month’s earnings. The company said it had reached 169,000 subscribers by March 2015, but didn’t say how many it had by the end of June. (Outside estimates pegged it at having around 250,000.)

However, despite the additions, Dish’s net pay-TV subscribers – a figure that now includes Sling customers – fell by 81,000 in the quarter. That indicates that Sling is not growing fast enough to stem subscriber loss. But Dish beat on revenue and net income, as it’s been making more money from those paying customers who remain.

It’s unclear at this point how much Sling TV will grow in the future, especially as it has to compete with others on the market – not only those streaming services from pay TV providers, but also the bigger services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Instant Video, Hulu and HBO, for example.

Sling’s new Amazon tablet app is now available as free download on the Amazon Appstore, and works on Amazon Fire HDX 8.9, Fire HDX 7, Fire HD 7 or Fire HD 6 tablets.

Customers can try the service for free for 2 weeks, before having to pay the $20 per month fee for Sling after the trial period ends.

In addition to the channels that come with the core Sling TV package, like ESPN, AMC, HGTV, TNT, A&E and content from Maker Studios, Sling also lets you tack on $5 per month “channel packs” focused on things like sports, lifestyle, or kid-friendly programming, for example. It also resells HBO, which is another $15 per month.