• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 31, 2016

Pay TV cable companies are scary and evil — at least according to some new Sling TV commercials.

Sling, owned by Dish Network, is one of the now-older “skinny” digital TV services, pursuing consumers who believe they are paying too much for entertainment. And what better way to do that than reigniting the anti-brand profile of TV’s long-time-perceived poster child of high entertainment costs: cable.

A series of Sling commercials talk up the comparison of traditional cable operator bills, which can be over $100 a month, with that of Sling TV, which can be $20 a month. Actor Danny Trejo, who plays bad guys often, offers up this “bad” comparison message.

Positioning cable as evil or bad isn’t new, of course. Satellite pay TV providers and fiber-based telco pay TV companies have been offering up many approaches like this for some time. It’s new to have “skinny” TV services diving in, though.

Early on, negative profiles of the cable industry were focused on the quality of service, with mentions of waiting around all day for the cable technician to come.

Now, more of a plain dollars-and-cents approach seems to work the best.

That said, the biggest cable operator in the U.S., Comcast, continues to take great pains to tout specific features, such as the ability to use one's “voice” to engage a TV remote, or a larger supply of content than the competition.

Many of these recent Comcast ads have an announcer saying: “Don’t fall for DirecTV.”

When will traditional cable operators start beating up on the likes of Sling TV, and perhaps others as well? Is this the traditional TV message cost-conscious TV consumers will continue to want?