PlayStation Vue expands to San Francisco and Los Angeles; a la carte channels like Showtime, Fox Soccer Plus, and Machinima coming in July
PlayStation Vue announces a la carte service, coming to SF and LA — Sony's PlayStation live TV streaming service is launching tonight in new markets …
Context & Ripple Effects
Sony's live-TV play has been a city-at-a-time build-out since the March launch of PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia at $50/month for 85 channels, with the company flagging a nationwide rollout by the end of 2015. Adding San Francisco and Los Angeles tonight is that plan on schedule.
The more consequential announcement is structural: from July, Vue sells individual channels — Showtime, Fox Soccer Plus, Machinima — outside the core package. That turns a bundled replacement for cable into a testbed for partial unbundling, months before Sony's own ESPN, ABC, and Disney additions deepen the linear lineup.
First-order effects
- San Francisco and Los Angeles viewers get access to Vue's live-TV packages starting tonight, roughly doubling the service's footprint from the three launch cities.
- Premium-channel buyers gain an option cable never offered: subscribing to Showtime alone through Vue from July, rather than paying for a full 85-channel tier to reach it.
Second-order effects
- Channel owners like Showtime and Machinima acquire a direct streaming storefront alongside their carriage deals, weakening the assumption that premium networks must ride inside a distributor's bundle.
- If à la carte sales cannibalize Vue's own $50/month tiers, Sony faces pressure to restructure its packaging — which is where the later $30 Slim bundles land.
Third-order effects
- A working à la carte layer points toward pay TV splitting into tiers — skinny bundles for broadcast plus single-channel add-ons — eroding the economics that let distributors charge one price for everything.
- For Sony, Vue's growth beyond PlayStation hardware foreshadows the device-agnostic strategy visible in its later Android TV and Apple TV releases, making Vue a standalone TV business rather than a console perk.
The trend: Live TV streaming is expanding market by market while channels peel off from the traditional bundle, with Sony's Vue among the first services to sell both structures side by side.