If you are both a college football fan and a cord-cutter, you have three ways to see ESPN’s season kickoff tonight between North Carolina and South Carolina: Borrow a login to the Watch ESPN app from someone who trusts you with that sort of thing, watch it at your local sports bar, or subscribe to Sling TV.

Although MLB.TV, NBA League Pass, NHL GameCenter Live, and NFL Sunday Ticket (depending on where you live) offer live streaming packages without a cable or satellite subscription, NCAA college football does not have a similar deal. Bob Iger, the chairman of ESPN parent company Disney, commented recently that ESPN would likely offer a standalone streaming product but probably not in the next five years.

For the 2015 season, your best play for cable-free college football is Sling TV, which satellite carrier DISH Network launched earlier this year as a free-standing service. Sling base package of live and on-demand content from about 20 cable networks — including ESPN and ESPN2 — is $20-a-month, and an add-on sports package that includes ESPNEWS, ESPNU and the SEC Network is another $5 a month. That’s pricy compared to HBO Now ($15 a month) or Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime ($8 a month), but none of those guys have ESPN.

Decider sat down with Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch to talk about how things have been going since the service started in February, what people are watching, and whether he expects competition for ESPN programming from other streaming providers.

DECIDER: Have you seen a big spike in viewership when you air sports and big events?

ROGER LYNCH: We see a spike in viewership and signups around tentpole events — NCAA basketball tournament, NBA playoffs, and we’ve started seeing it with NFL preseason games and will certainly see it when the season starts. And also things like the Game of Thrones premiere and The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, which drive high levels of viewership and new subscriber activations.

Do you see spikes for big news events?

Those don’t necessarily drive new activations, but we see higher viewership of CNN when there are big news events.

Is there any particular live programming you don’t have that you get asked for a lot?

More sports. We have a lot of sports particularly with the amount of college football on all the ESPN networks and the SEC Network.

Sling subscribers have access to the Watch ESPN app, right?

Right.

Will that include ABC college football games that are available on the Watch ESPN platform?

I’m not sure what ESPN’s plans are yet, but we have seen ESPN do that with the NBA playoff games that were on ABC, which were also on ESPN3.

What college football is in the $5-a-month Sports Extra package that’s not in the base package?

ESPN and ESPN2 are in the basic package, and all of the others are in the Sports Extra package.

You don’t have any of the broadcast networks right now?

We carry Univision, which is quite popular, but we don’t carry any of the major broadcast networks. We do know that the vast majority of our customers are already watching those networks with antennas.

Is the plan to add the broadcast networks at some point?

Our deal with Disney will include ABC. Our plan is to launch a broadcast tier that people could add on. The local TV business in the U.S. is quite complicated because of the number of different local affiliates and the rights questions between the national networks and the affiliates and the sports leagues. We like the fact that we have a nationwide offering that is the same everywhere, and our customers are watching the content on those networks either by watching Hulu or by putting up an antenna. We want to have a broadcast tier, but our customers are figuring out a way to watch that content already.

Does Sling have ESPN exclusive of other streaming providers for any period of time?

There’s no contractual exclusivity, but we have de facto exclusivity right now.

You won’t have much NFL because you don’t have CBS, FOX or NBC, but you’ll have the Monday night game on ESPN.

Our customers will have access to all of that football. The vast majority of our customers use an antenna to watch that content for free. I think a lot of people have not appreciated how much growth there has been in the over-the-air market.

You have survey data, I guess, about how your customers are watching broadcast?

Yes. The survey data bears this out: You go get an antenna for $35, you plug it into your TV, and it’s a fantastic combination with Sling TV. We’re seeing dramatic growth in antenna sales, and the antenna manufacturers have told us their sales have increased significantly since we launched.

Do you anticipate Apple or some of your other competitors beginning to offer ESPN in the next year?

I would expect to see Disney license ESPN to others, including possibly Apple. People are watching us and seeing that we’re having some success in the market, and I’m sure that’s affecting their plans for what they want to launch. These deals are complicated. If you’re not in the industry already as a pay TV operator, it’s even more difficult because you have little negotiating leverage. I think Apple is finding that out.

Do you mean negotiating the licensing price?

For price, for packaging. When you negotiate with these companies you negotiate the price you pay is one thing, but equally important is how you’re required to package it — how many channels you put in the base package and which ones.

So a network will say they have to be in the same tier as these four other networks?

If you look at what Sony has launched for Playstation Vue and what they’ve launched for us, Vue has more channels. The easy thing for us would have been to put all those channels into our service, but that’s just recreating the pay TV bundle, and that is not our strategy. We think that market is already well served by all the pay TV operators. Replicating the same bundles over the internet doesn’t solve that problem.

Hulu has a lot of the same cable content as Sling, plus broadcast network content and some original content. What’s the value proposition for Sling at $20 vs. Hulu at $8? Is the sports programming the main difference?

It’s not just the sports programming. I think Hulu is a great value at $8; there’s a lot of great content. But it’s not live content, and there’s no sports. The key differences are having the latest episodes when they’re broadcast, all of the sports, and a lot of flexibility to customize a package based on your interests. If you want more sports, it’s just $5 more. If you want more kids programming, it’s just $5 more. If you compare that to a traditional pay TV package, it’s a tremendous value.

Do you have more networks coming soon that you haven’t announced yet?

We’re going to continue to launch more networks and more devices.

What devices are you not on yet besides Apple TV?

We haven’t launched ChromeCast yet. That’s one we intend to launch this year.

Will you be on the new Apple TV, which Apple may announced at their event on September 9?

We’re waiting to see what they announce. If Apple makes an API available and has reasonable business terms, we’d certainly be happy to be on Apple TV.

Do you think the streaming aggregation business is in a space where, say, 20 new competitors could jump in during the next year, or are there particular economies of scale or contractual advantages that would be barriers to entry for new companies?

I think we’ll see two things. One is more niche players that aggregate interesting content in smaller packages at a very low price. Like Crunchyroll, which has anime. That’s a successful strategy. The other is what we’re doing — premium content — where the barriers are a bit higher. If you approach a big programmer to launch a new over-the-top service and you have zero subscribers, you’re going to pay a very high rate for that content. That will make you very uncompetitive. I don’t know that you’d see 20 competitors with the premium content that we have, but you’ll certainly see — like with any new industry — some competitors will succeed, some will not succeed, some consolidation, and I would expect that eight years from now you may have four or five strong competitors.

Do you think as this market continues to mature that consumers won’t just have Netflix or Hulu or Sling, but that you’ll have two or three or those services?

Yes, exactly. The traditional pay TV business was to provide all of the content, license all the channels, and package it into a big bundle. Then Netflix came along, and it had some stuff that wasn’t on traditional TV. Consumers now — and particularly millennials — are comfortable putting together their own bundles. We view Sling as a piece in the puzzle that everyone will put together — and hopefully it’s the biggest piece — but that they’ll put us together with Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Prime or a niche service or an antenna and create their own bundle. We’re not trying to be the whole puzzle. We’re trying to be a piece of the puzzle.

Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu have decided that original content is an important differentiation. Is that something you are considering?

Right now, we prefer to work with our channel partners to do that. If you’re an on-demand service like that, original content is more important. The content that those services get is not first window. It’s already been on AMC or CBS or whatever the channel, so to have premium first-run content you’re competing with those networks. There’s less incentive for us to go out and create original content. We already have first-run content.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Biographile and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.