Ready to cut the cable? Ditch your expensive satellite or cable TV service for something like Sling TV? Better not dawdle; if your 1.99 million other friends manage to get themselves signed up for Sling TV, you're out of luck. Dish Network's streaming service has a subscriber cap.

According to Ad Age, Dish Network has put a limit of 2 million subscribers on its Sling TV service, which offers a select number of channels over the Internet for $20 per month. It still has a ways to go before it hits that milestone; Sling TV reportedly had about 100,000 subscribers as of last month, though Dish isn't confirming.>p>

While it might seem a bit odd that a service is looking to put a hard cap on the amount of money it could conceivably make from streaming service fans, that's just the fickle nature of the media industry. The core problem is fairly simple. Big media companies want to find a way to give a certain subset of their customers exactly what they wantmore of an "a la carte" setup where they only get some of the specific channels they want to see (and don't have to pay for all the ones they don't care about). However, these companies also have to keep these kinds of streaming services from becoming too popular, lest they cut into the overall money that these companies (and those who make the content for these broadcasters) ultimately make.

According to David Zaslav, Discovery CEO, Sling TV is bound by agreements that Dish Network has made with content creators. As Ad Age noted, that means that Sling TV can't push past its subscriber limit or content companies might start pulling their media from the service.

That said, it's certainly possible that these conditions could change based on how much the market embraces all-streaming offerings over cable or satellite service. It also remains to be seen how industry heavyweights like Apple and Verizon might mix everything up with their own streaming services. It's just too early to tell whether attempts at limiting the popularity of streaming services will prove successful, or whether it's just a last-ditch effort before a mass of people start cutting the cable TV cord for good.

Related Dish Networks and Sling TV Could Finally Kill Cable

For more, see PCMag's full review of Sling TV and the video below.

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