A satellite company’s streaming service, kept apart.

Sling TV is a live television service streamed over the internet in the United States. Dish revealed it at CES 2015; Engadget’s Edgar Alvarez reported the unveiling on 5 January 2015. Dish told the site the service had been years in the making and grew out of what it had learned from Dish Anywhere and DishWorld, its internet-based package of international channels. DishWorld was to be folded into the new service under the name Sling International.

Engadget reported that Roger Lynch had been appointed by Dish as Sling TV’s chief executive. “Two years ago we decided we wanted to establish an entire separate service,” Lynch told the site. The basic package listed at the reveal included ESPN, ESPN2, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, Food Network, HGTV and Disney Channel, and the service was to run from launch on iOS, Android, Amazon’s Fire TV, Nexus Player, Xbox One, Roku players, LG and Samsung smart televisions and the web.

The naming decision is the heart of this identity. Engadget wrote that Dish was adamant that Sling TV was its own thing, and that this was why, in Lynch’s words, the service did not carry any Dish branding. The site pointed out that Dish already used the Sling name on a set-top box, the Hopper with Sling, part of the Dish Anywhere ecosystem.

English Wikipedia says the service went through a one-month, invitation-only beta and launched formally on 9 February 2015. At the reveal, Engadget had reported that it was expected to launch “within the next month.” Wikipedia also says that in February 2023 the free part of the service was renamed Sling Freestream; Cord Cutters News used that name for the free tier in a March 2024 report.

Colour as product architecture, and a name that changed back.

The interface was meant to look the same everywhere. Testing a demo on a Roku 3 and an iPad Air in January 2015, Alvarez wrote that Dish clearly wanted the user interface to follow the same design guidelines across devices, regardless of platform. He described a Mini Guide showing what was “On Now” across networks, with “Watch Now” and “Start Over” options, and a “Network View” that gathered all the programming available from a network, including on-demand shows.

Colour became the way Sling named its packages. On 1 July 2016 the trade site Light Reading carried Sling TV’s announcement, datelined Englewood, Colorado, under the headline “Sling Updates, Color Codes TV Bundles.” The single-stream service became Sling Orange and the multi-stream service, which had been introduced as a beta that April, became Sling Blue. The announcement also introduced an option to take Sling Orange and Sling Blue together, so a viewer could choose orange, blue or both.

The split had roots in the launch. At the January 2015 reveal Engadget reported that Sling TV accounts would be limited to one stream at a time, and that the company had no comment when asked whether simultaneous streams per account would follow. The site also reported that “Start Over” depended on the content rights for each network and that the service would include a built-in movie-rental feature. The multi-stream option that arrived as a beta in April 2016 became Sling Blue that summer, while the single-stream service kept its place as Sling Orange.

The ownership changed above the brand while the name stayed. On 2 January 2024 Cord Cutters News reported that EchoStar had completed its acquisition of DISH Network and that the combined company would be called EchoStar Corporation. DISH would remain the pay-TV brand, and Sling TV, owned by DISH, should not see any changes for now. The report noted that DISH and EchoStar had split in 2008, the one to focus on pay TV and the other on satellites and networking. EchoStar has owned Sling TV, through DISH Network, since that merger.

The wordmark has moved too. On 15 March 2024 Cord Cutters News reported that Sling TV, which for some time had been presenting its logo simply as “Sling,” had quietly launched a new logo that brought “TV” back. The site described the new logo as very similar to the old Sling logo with TV added, and noted that the file on Sling TV’s website was named “Sling rebrand logo.” It said it had asked Sling TV for comment and had not received a reply when it published.

Design and documentation.

A streaming service meets its audience in small rectangles before anything else. The app icon on a phone, a smart-TV home row or a set-top menu is usually the first brand surface a viewer touches, so it has to read at thumbnail size, against light and dark system themes, and next to rival tiles. Designers working at that size weigh a single letterform, a compact symbol or a short wordmark against a full logo lock-up.

The launch screen and the short ident that plays before a title do a different job. They borrow from broadcast branding: a few seconds of motion, sometimes a sound cue, that tells the viewer whose service they are inside. For designers, the useful exercise is to study how a static mark behaves once it moves, and how much of the identity survives when the animation is cut to a single frame.

Colour ownership is the third lever. A service can keep one hue across its icon, buttons, highlights and marketing, or work with a multicolour mark and decide which colour leads in each context. The guides below look at how each name, mark and palette is documented, without reproducing any of them.

A sub-brand built to stand apart.

Sling TV is the opposite case to a sub-brand that leans on its parent. At the 2015 reveal Dish kept its own name off the service, and the documented brand decisions since then are about the Sling name itself: whether to say “Sling” or “Sling TV,” and how to sort the product into packages a viewer can recognise at a glance.

The 2016 colour-coding is the lesson to study. Naming the packages Sling Orange and Sling Blue turned a choice between a single stream and multiple streams into a choice between two colours, so the palette became part of how the product is explained, not just decoration. The March 2024 logo change, reported by Cord Cutters News as a return of “TV” to a mark close to the existing Sling design, shows the same name being tuned rather than replaced.

For a design guide, Sling TV shows how a service can build its identity on a name kept separate from its owner and on colour used as product architecture. Compare it with YouTube TV, which takes its parent’s system whole, with Hulu, and with ESPN, one of the networks in its launch package. For this guide we use an orange, two blues, navy and a pale grey with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sling TV’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.