Sony PS Vue Only Available in 3 Cities

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 19, 8:18AM EDT · Published Mar 19, 6:37AM EDT

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Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) has announced its new PlayStation Vue TV product. It may be an attractive alternative to traditional cable and satellite systems. However, most people cannot get the new service. It is only available in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. The rest of America is out of luck.

Introducing a new product that is trumpeted as a revolutionary step away from a traditional entertainment system is sure to alienate potential customers who have no access to it. Vue does appear attractive. It runs from the cloud, which has become the case with many other movie and TV services, particularly Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN). It works with both PS3 and PS4 platforms, which means it might eventually be available to millions of people. It is priced from $49.99 to $69.99 a month. Those offers may be too high for a service that is very late to the streaming TV market. The $49.99 product only has a little more than 50 stations.

Other features are barely ordinary:

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Very many of the channels Sony offers barely have a modest viewer base, which means Vue will have limited appeal. Among those channels are Chiller and Sprout. Sony does not say much about premium content, which is front and center for products like Amazon’s.

Sony’s promotion for Vue is that consumers can “Stop missing out on great television,” at least for people who live in three cities. A product that is late to market has to do much better.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.