PlayStation Vue

» see playstation.com/vue as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

playstation vue was us-only at the cable-licensing layer. every channel deal sony signed for it was for us viewers on us internet connections, and the app refused to work for anyone outside that perimeter. from turkey it never existed except as a press-release headline about how sony was going to compete with cable.

vue launched on march 18 2015 as an app you opened on a ps3 or ps4. the bundle was around 75 channels at launch, sourced from the same cable groups that fed an actual cable box: cbs and viacom and nbcuniversal and discovery and the rest. the pitch was simple. cable was getting expensive and people had already bought a playstation. why not use that playstation to replace cable instead of paying a separate cable box bill on top of it.

by august 2018 vue had reached around 745 thousand subscribers, which sounds like a decent number for a live-tv app until you do the per-subscriber math against what it cost to license channels at that scale. sony was losing money on every customer. by late 2019 the company had decided it could not keep absorbing the cost difference, and the shutdown got announced on october 29 2019. the service went fully dark on january 30 2020.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

vue arrived at a real moment. cable subscriptions were declining for the first time in decades, and sling tv had launched a month earlier with a smaller cheaper bundle. every tech company was looking at the pay-tv stack to figure out where to slot in. sony came in with the heaviest bundle and the best app on a console anyone already owned.

the product itself was good. cloud dvr was included as standard, and multi-stream let different rooms watch different channels at the same time. the on-screen guide worked on the ps4 controller without needing to be configured by hand. people who used vue mostly liked vue. the problem was always the bill on sony's side, not the bill on the customer's side.

~ the fall ~

sony spent five years renegotiating channel deals against networks that did not want a console maker to undercut their cable carriage. every contract renewal got more expensive. by 2019 vue's monthly price had climbed past what cable was charging for the same bundle. that is the point at which a cord-cutter product has lost its reason to exist.

the october 29 2019 announcement was unusually frank for sony. the press release said the pay-tv industry was "slower to change than we expected" and that the content economics had not improved. there was no successor service. sony did not try to spin vue out or sell it to a cable operator. they just turned it off three months later.

~ the legacy ~

vue is now the standard reference for "cord-cutter live tv is harder than it looks." every service that came after it ran into the same wall. youtube tv kept raising prices while sling kept shrinking the bundle. hulu live ran the same losing math under disney. the playstation vue shutdown is the moment the streaming-replaces-cable story stopped looking inevitable and started looking like a different version of the same content-cost problem.

the ps4 app icon disappeared cleanly on january 30 2020. the social-feed and recommended-show layer of the app went with it. for the people who had used vue as their primary tv source for five years, the experience of the shutdown was the most cable-industry possible. a shutdown notice arrived in october 2019 and a final day arrived three months later. after that there was nothing. exactly the situation vue had been pitched as fixing.

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