| Service | Price/mo | Has MTV? |
|---|---|---|
| Philo | $25.00 | Yes |
| Sling Blue | $45.99 | Yes |
| Sling Orange | $45.99 | No |
| DirecTV Stream | $82.99 | Yes |
| YouTube TV | $82.99 | Yes |
| Fubo | $85.00 | Yes |
| Hulu + Live TV | $89.99 | Yes |
Prices and lineups as of 2026-07-19. Verify on the provider's own page before you sign up; carriage and pricing change often and can vary by zip code.
MTV is one of the clearer examples on this site of why "which Sling plan do I have" actually matters instead of being a rounding error. Sling Orange and Sling Blue are the same company, launched the same year, priced identically at $45.99/mo, and most people who haven't compared them assume the channel lineup is basically the same with a different sports mix. It isn't. Sling Orange builds its lineup around a single-stream ESPN-heavy package, and MTV isn't part of that bundle. Sling Blue is built around a broader general-entertainment lineup, and MTV is in it. Same price, same company, different answer to "can I watch MTV," which is exactly the kind of gotcha this site exists to catch before you sign up for the wrong one.
Outside of that one split, MTV is carried almost everywhere. Philo, the cheapest live-TV plan on the market at $25.00/mo, carries it, along with every full-lineup service checked here: YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream, Fubo, and Hulu + Live TV, all in the $82.99-$89.99/mo range. So the honest summary is: MTV is not a channel that forces you into an expensive plan, the way a channel like Nickelodeon does. The only real decision point is making sure that if a Sling plan is what you're considering, you pick Blue, not Orange.
A free antenna will never carry MTV, no matter how good your signal is or how close you live to the broadcast towers. It's a cable-only network with no over-the-air spectrum presence at any price, from any provider, full stop. What an antenna does get you free in most markets: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, PBS, and The CW, plus whatever local subchannels your market carries. None of that is MTV or anything close to its programming, so an antenna is not a substitute here, only a companion for the local-channel side of your lineup.
If you're pairing Philo's $25.00/mo plan with an antenna to also cover local news and network primetime, see how antennas actually work for the indoor/attic/roof distinction and the distance caveats before you buy one. And check thefull monthly cost comparison to see how a Philo-plus-antenna setup stacks up against a typical cable bill, since the two together can land well under half of what most households are currently paying.
Philo at $25.00/mo is a strong pick if MTV sits alongside other lifestyle and general-entertainment viewing in your household, the kind of channel mix Philo was built around. It skips live sports, 24-hour cable news, and every ABC/CBS/NBC/FOX/PBS local affiliate entirely, by design, which is exactly why it can charge a third of what the full-lineup services cost. That's a fair trade if your household mostly watches entertainment and reality programming rather than the evening news or Sunday football.
If your household also wants ESPN, ABC's Monday Night Football, or a 24-hour news channel, Philo alone won't cover it and MTV alone shouldn't be the reason you overpay for a bigger plan you don't otherwise need. In that case, Sling Blue at $45.99/mo is the next step up that still carries MTV, and the full-lineup services (YouTube TV, DirecTV Stream, Fubo, Hulu + Live TV) cover everything at once for $82.99-$89.99/mo. Check the rest of your household's must-have channels against our channel finder before deciding, since MTV rarely stands alone as the single deciding factor in which plan to buy.
MTV sits in a different category than most of the other channels covered on this site. It's not a kids' channel like Nickelodeon, which skews younger and is missing from the cheapest budget plans entirely; it's not a lifestyle channel like Discovery Channel or Food Network, both of which are carried on every plan we checked with no exceptions at all. MTV's carriage pattern lands in between: nearly universal, but with one specific, easy-to-miss exception in the Sling lineup rather than a clean "every plan has it" or "only the expensive plans have it" story.
That's worth knowing if you're comparing several channels at once to decide on a plan. A household that wants MTV plus Nickelodeon, for example, can't lean on Philo or either Sling plan for both; Nickelodeon alone forces a full-lineup service regardless of what MTV needs. A household that wants MTV plus Discovery Channel or Food Network, on the other hand, is covered by Philo's $25.00/mo plan for all three, with the single caveat of steering clear of Sling Orange if a Sling plan is what you're weighing instead.