Here’s a conundrum our household of Philadelphia Eagles fans has frequently faced: how to watch an Eagles matchup on ESPN’s Monday Night Football without cable or a live streaming TV subscription.
Sure, you can try to snag a seven-day free trial of one streaming service or another (we blew through those already). Or maybe MNF is on ABC that week—or not. Then there’s ESPN’s upcoming streaming service, which will cost $40 for a month’s subscription. Or—gulp—you can pay even more for a live streaming TV service like Hulu + Live TV or YouTube TV.
Personally, I’ve always longed for something like a game pass or a day pass—a discounted, short-term subscription for those times when there’s a Monday Night Football game that we can’t watch any other way.
Well, Sling just rolled out something along those lines: a Sling Day Pass that gives you the run of Sling Orange, which includes ESPN, ESPN2, and more—for $5.
Alongside the Sling’s new Day Pass, there’s also a Weekend Pass for $9.99, good for catching a full weekend of college football, or $14.99 for a Week Pass.
You can also tack on extra channels above and beyond those offered on Sling Orange with a Sling Extras add-on, which cost $1 for Day Pass users (bringing the total Day Pass cost to $6), $2 for the Weekend Pass, or $3 for the Week Pass.
Sling Orange (which also includes CNN, TBS, TNT, HGTV, and about two-dozen other channels) normally costs $45.99 a month, or roughly $1.33 a day—so clearly, the $5 daily rate for a Sling Day Pass is far pricier than paying for a full month’s worth of Orange.
That said, there have been plenty of times when all I wanted was access to ESPN for a single day—well, just three hours, give or take—to watch a Monday Night Football game that I otherwise couldn’t stream without coughing up way more for a month-long streaming subscription or somehow snagging a free trial of something.
Now, I’d love something similar for YouTube’s NFL Sunday Ticket, which now at least offers a single month option. But even just one month of Sunday Ticket costs a whopping $85 for new subscribers, and even more for returning members (those prices are subject to change as YouTube rolls out frequent discounts). Why not a Sunday Ticket day pass, or even a single game pass? (Of course, knowing the NFL, I’m sure the prices for those hypothetical options would be nuts.)
In any case, I’m down for the Sling Day Pass the next time there’s an ESPN-only Monday Night Football game with the Eagles. (It looks like the Eagles MNF games this season will all be simulcast on ABC, but they could always be “flexed” into a non-ABC Monday game, so you never know.)
