Sony shut PlayStation Vue after four years — a live-TV bundle that never paid for itself

PlayStation Vue launched in March 2015 as Sony's answer to cable: a cloud-based live-TV bundle streamed over the internet, first to PlayStation consoles and later to web, mobile, Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV. It was an early shot at cutting the cord — a full cable package with no set-top box, no long contract and DVR in the cloud.

The appeal stayed niche. At its peak in August 2018 Vue had around 745,000 subscribers — a rounding error beside the cable networks it was trying to displace. Content was the trap: carrying broadcast and cable channels meant paying the same escalating carriage fees cable paid, spread across an audience a fraction of cable's size.

On 29 October 2019 Sony announced it was shutting the service down, effective 30 January 2020. The company's own statement read like an obituary: 'we had a strong, competitive Pay TV industry with expensive content and network deals, and the rate of change with our business was slower than we expected.'

Four years after launch, the service that was meant to prove Sony could own the living room was gone. The subscribers and infrastructure were dissolved back into the company, and what it left behind was a caution about the cost of renting a channel line-up.