Sony Corp. is aiming to steal away some of the TV industry’s highest-paying subscribers with a streaming video service that it will begin rolling out in the New York area later this month.
Sony said its new service, PlayStation Vue, will initially carry channels owned by a variety of media companies, including CBS Corp. , Viacom Inc. and many others. Sony’s pitch is that its service will give TV viewing a much-needed update, with an easy-to-use guide that does away with the scrolling channel list and instead lets consumers search quickly for shows, mark their favorites, scan recommendations, and store programs in a cloud-based digital video recorder.
Sony’s service joins a growing array of online TV offerings for consumers. Individual networks like HBO and CBS are launching subscription video services, and satellite operator Dish Network Corp. plans to offer a cable-channels package online.
Those companies, which all have a stake in protecting the traditional pay-TV business, say they are primarily targeting the roughly 10 million broadband-only households that don’t subscribe to pay television. By contrast, Sony plans to aggressively court the customers of cable-TV giants like Comcast.
There are risks for Sony, given how competitive the industry is. Consumers have gotten used to relatively inexpensive online video services. Netflix , for instance, costs new customers $8.99 a month. Dish says its planned service will cost a “dollar a day,” or about $30 a month. Meanwhile, pay-TV providers like Comcast are aggressively rolling out advanced set-top boxes and guides to stave off the threat from companies like Sony.
Sony has some clear advantages. There are already about 35 million users of its PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles, providing a large installed base. And, according to the company, those users are mostly in between 18-to-35 years old, a coveted and hard-to-reach demographic for advertisers. PlayStation Vue will initially consist of about 75 channels. Rather than listing them in a particular order, Sony’s service will promote a variety of live channels in a market at any given time, based on what’s trending among PlayStation users. It will also recommend shows based on what a customer has previously watched and offer suggestions based on what its content partners want to promote.
Sony says its gaming customers tend to subscribe to expensive bundles of pay-television and broadband service today, making them among the highest-value customers to cable-TV providers. “We’re going after the PlayStation user who is today not watching TV and driving a large ratings decline and is at high risk for leaving” the pay-TV ecosystem entirely, said Amit Nag, senior director of business management and content for PlayStation Vue.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/sony-to-test-streaming-video-on-invite-only-basis-1415854864?mod=WSJ_TechWSJD_moreTopStories
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