MARINA DEL REY, CALIFORNIA — Sony is in talks with multiple streaming companies to sell assets related to its soon-to-shutter PlayStation Vue virtual MVPD service.

An executive at another streaming company, who asked not to be identified because he is under non-disclosure agreement with Sony, said he had recent talks with the company about transitioning over a user base that still has around 500,000 consumers. The executive, who spoke to MCN at Parks Associates “Future of Video” conference Tuesday, said Sony is also talking about offloading intellectual property and technology assets related to Vue.

The audience base is said is not eroding quickly, despite Sony’s announcement in late-October that it will shutter PlayStation Vue on January 20. The source said Sony’s decision to offer Vue’s last month of service free—in addition to an audience generally satisfied with Vue’s experience—has left the customer base “largely intact.”

The meetings, the source said, are being led by Dwayne Benefield, VP and general manager of PlayStation Vue. And Sony wants to have an agreement in place by the end of this week.

The source said Sony is keenly interested in transitioning PlayStation Vue's personnel. "In Japan, you take care of your family, and I think that's what they want to do here," the source said. "Plan A is to sell it as a lump, but I don't think anyone wants it as a lump."

Next TV’s email to a Sony rep for comment has not been responded to as of yet.

Related: Sony PlayStation Vue: Requiem for a Revolutionary

It was widely reported that prior to that announcement, Sony was shopping Vue, either for sale whole or piecemeal. It’s unclear as to how Sony would transition Vue’s user base.

Executives at rival streaming operations say PlayStation Vue delivered one of the better overall streaming experiences in the OTT business. However, despite a robust price point, the platform’s expenses run high.

Not only does Sony pay a premium to purchase Vue’s live streaming technology from Disney’s BAMTech, its staffing numbers run high, the rival executive source told Next TV. “We do what they do with less than a third of the staff,” he said.

According to the source, Sony spent aggressively on marketing and promotion early on to launch PlayStation Vue. It put itself further in the hole, keeping the more robust service's price point artificially low to compete with Dish's Sling TV, which was first into the market with a much skinnier program offering.

"If they hadn't done that, they'd still be in business," the source said. "It's a sticky service. It probably has the lowest churn in the video industry." 

Since Sony first announced that it will shutter its five-year-old PlayStation Vue service at the end of January, the general reaction from the media-tech world has been a shrug. 

The rising costs of program licensing has rendered the business model for so-called virtual MVPDs like PlayStation Vue moot. In Vue’s case, further raising the price of its $50 base tier—a necessary move to sustain any level of profitability—meant encroaching into a dicey pricing proposition where there was little incentive for consumers to give up their full linear pay TV bundle. 

Certainly, in a business in which rivals Hulu Live TV, Sling TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV Now,  fuboTV and Philo are all live-streaming varying iterations of skinny linear network bundles at razor-thin profit margins, it wasn’t a matter of if a vMVPD—or two!—would go, but when. 

That the first to go was PlayStation Vue—which was labeled as “DOA” by a Diffusion Group analyst after the service rolled out in March 2015 without ESPN—wasn’t a surprise. 

“Unfortunately, the highly competitive pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected,” blogged John Kodera, deputy president of Sony Interactive Entertainment, in an October statement announcing the pending closure of PlayStation Vue. “Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business.”

With the announcement coming about six months after Sony divested from Crackle, Vue’s shuttering was also seen as yet another awkward retrenchment by Sony from a digital venture. But Sony’s five-year Vue gambit can be, er, viewed from another perspective: as a noble, ambitious, somewhat quixotic media venture, with the Japanese media-tech conglomerate deemed successful merely for having tried in the first place. 

These days, vMVPDs are generally considered part of the old linear universe. The launches—and pending launches—of Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max and Peacock have officially ushered in the age of disaggregation of video services into on-demand, streaming platforms, delivered directly to consumers by media companies. In terms of any re-aggregation and bundling, it’s the Amazon Channels model that’s seen as the future. 

A Revolutionary

Going back five years, to that moment when Sony gestated PlayStation Vue, feels like five decades ago in OTT time. But back then, the live streaming of traditional, linear broadcast and cable networks was viewed as the revolution. Back in 2014, the Wall Street Journal had a string of anonymously sourced reports about Apple working on an ambitious plan to rope in hundreds—nay, thousands—of local broadcast affiliates. Not only would you be able to watch ESPN, TNT and Comedy Central on your iPhone, but you’d get your local ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC station, too. 

Apple was going to make good on the vision of its late founder, Steve Jobs, to “solve the problem” of TV. And that vision was, essentially, a robust version of the vMVPD as we’ve come to know it. 

But it was Sony that actually made good on the promise. 

Launching at CES in January 2015, Dish Network was actually the first vMVPD in the market, bundling a handful of major cable networks in a live-streamed service full of technical glitches, all for $20 a month. 

Sony slowly rolled out Vue, meanwhile, with a robust base-tier package, priced at $50 a month for 85 channels, usually unfurling into new markets only when it could deliver the local broadcast networks. Eventually, Sony came to terms with The Walt Disney Company, adding ESPN, and it began to amass a very linear-pay-TV-like collection of regional sports networks. Its distribution extended far beyond the PlayStation 4 video console to every major OTT and mobile platform. PS Vue even offered a cloud DVR. 

It was the full pay TV experience, signed up for without a contract or truck roll, positioned to be cancelled at any time the consumer chose. But starting with the arrival of AT&T’s erstwhile DirecTV Now back in November 2016, which was priced at only $35 a month, the market changed fast. 

Among the major OTT services, PlayStation Vue routinely ranked high in customer satisfaction, its technology underpinned by Disney’s acclaimed BAMTech. But Sony was never very forthcoming about how many customers Vue had (eMarketer pegs Vue at around 800,000 users). The platform’s traction in the marketplace—light in humble beginnings that included little in the way of national promotion—never seemed to improve as a flurry of new competitors like Hulu, YouTube and AT&T/DirecTV entered the vMVPD scene. 

Indeed, whenever a high-ranking Sony executive would address the topic of PlayStation Vue, words were carefully parsed to see how committed the conglomerate remained to the service. Kodera told Sony investors as recently as May of last year that Vue was still a vital part of Sony’s plan to emphasize subscription services that could play on its installed base of PlayStation 4 consoles.

In the end, though, Sony was never able to develop an edge for Vue with advanced advertising—an attribute that has kept Sling TV, Hulu Live TV and YouTube TV’s backers in the game. 

“Advertisers are eager to tap into the small slice of video ad inventory that operators get as part of most carriage agreements," wrote Seth Shafer, a research analyst with Kagan, a media market research group within S&P Global Market. "Sony largely lacked that same component, so it may have been more challenging for the company to monetize its video ad inventory through Vue."

Following Sony’s decision earlier this week to shutter its 5-year-old virtual MVPD, PlayStation Vue, we can expect more closures and/or consolidation in the vMVPD business, claims Cowen analyst Gregory Williams.

“Despite the cord cutting acceleration, vMVPDs have seen a significant net add deceleration, struggling to compete in the crowded OTT market against each other and the more than 300 direct-to-consumer apps,” Williams wrote in a note to investors today. “Our work suggests the slowdown is driven largely by price as vMVPD’s are sub-scale and playing in a generally irrational and unsustainable market. To that point, with the continued rise in programming costs, vMVPD economics continue to get tougher.”

If vMVPD pricing rises to a level of parity with traditional pay TV services, consumers will opt for direct-to consumer and VOD services, or not cut the cord at all, Willams said.

Related: Sony to Shutter PlayStation Vue

Currently, there are six remaining “large” vMVPDs in the market—Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, Sling TV, AT&T TV Now, Philo and fuboTV.

“With the vMVPD market becoming more rationalized and subsequently less appealing, longer term, we eventually see market exits (or consolidation) to three to five vMVPD’s,” Williams added.

As for why Vue was the first major vMVPD to succumb, an executive for a rival vMVPD suggested the platform’s costs were simply too high. Not only was Sony paying broadcast retransmission fees to include local stations in every market Vue operated in, the company also licensed a comprehensive set of regional sports networks.

On top of programming, operational costs probably weren’t inexpensive for Sony, the executive added, noting that Vue purchased its streaming technology from Disney-owned BAMTech, a fairly elite third-party vendor. 

Following Sony’s decision earlier this week to shutter its 5-year-old virtual MVPD, PlayStation Vue, we can expect more closures and/or consolidation in the vMVPD business, claims Cowen analyst Gregory Williams.

“Despite the cord cutting acceleration, vMVPDs have seen a significant net add deceleration, struggling to compete in the crowded OTT market against each other and the more than 300 direct-to-consumer apps,” Williams wrote in a note to investors today. “Our work suggests the slowdown is driven largely by price as vMVPD’s are sub-scale and playing in a generally irrational and unsustainable market. To that point, with the continued rise in programming costs, vMVPD economics continue to get tougher.”

If vMVPD pricing rises to a level of parity with traditional pay TV services, consumers will opt for direct-to consumer and VOD services, or not cut the cord at all, Willams said.

Related: Sony to Shutter PlayStation Vue

Currently, there are six remaining “large” vMVPDs in the market—Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, Sling TV, AT&T TV Now, Philo and fuboTV.

“With the vMVPD market becoming more rationalized and subsequently less appealing, longer term, we eventually see market exits (or consolidation) to three to five vMVPD’s,” Williams added.

As for why Vue was the first major vMVPD to succumb, an executive for a rival vMVPD suggested the platform’s costs were simply too high. Not only was Sony paying broadcast retransmission fees to include local stations in every market Vue operated in, the company also licensed a comprehensive set of regional sports networks.

On top of programming, operational costs probably weren’t inexpensive for Sony, the executive added, noting that Vue purchased its streaming technology from Disney-owned BAMTech, a fairly elite third-party vendor. 

Sony announced today that it will shutter its struggling virtual pay TV platform, PlayStation Vue, on January 30, roughly five years after it launched.

“Unfortunately, the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected. Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business,” blogged John Kodera, deputy president of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Launching in March 2015 alongside Dish Networks’ Sling TV, Sony struggled to gain traction in the low-margin business of live-streamed skinny programming bundles. The issue became more challenging when AT&T, Hulu, YouTube and a number of other virtual MVPD competitors began to emerge in 2016.

Sony never revealed a subscriber number, but widely published estimates suggests the service never got higher than 500,000 users. Like rival vMVPDs, meanwhile, it struggled to hold its price point amid fast-rising program licensing costs—it’s most recent cost bump over the summer put the Vue base tier at $50 a month.

The exit of Vue marks a maturation point for the vMVPD market, which has seen Sling TV maintain its market leadership and its growth. Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV also appear to have momentum, while AT&T Now has declined to around 1.1 million users after nearly reaching 2 million a year ago.

“We are very proud of what PlayStation Vue was able to accomplish,” wrote Kodera, who stressed that the PlayStation 4 console is still a viable option to use OTT apps. “We had ambitious goals for how our service could change how people watch TV, showcasing PlayStation’s ability to innovate in a brand-new category within the Pay TV industry. We want to thank all of our customers, some of whom have been with us since PlayStation Vue’s launch in 2015.”

The closure of Vue marks Sony's second major retrenchment from an OTT platform this year, with the conglomerate divesting its interest in Crackle back in March. 

Sony announced today that it will shutter its struggling virtual pay TV platform, PlayStation Vue, on January 30, roughly five years after it launched.

“Unfortunately, the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected. Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business,” blogged John Kodera, deputy president of Sony Interactive Entertainment.

Launching in March 2015 alongside Dish Networks’ Sling TV, Sony struggled to gain traction in the low-margin business of live-streamed skinny programming bundles. The issue became more challenging when AT&T, Hulu, YouTube and a number of other virtual MVPD competitors began to emerge in 2016.

Sony never revealed a subscriber number, but widely published estimates suggests the service never got higher than 500,000 users. Like rival vMVPDs, meanwhile, it struggled to hold its price point amid fast-rising program licensing costs—it’s most recent cost bump over the summer put the Vue base tier at $50 a month.

The exit of Vue marks a maturation point for the vMVPD market, which has seen Sling TV maintain its market leadership and its growth. Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV also appear to have momentum, while AT&T Now has declined to around 1.1 million users after nearly reaching 2 million a year ago.

“We are very proud of what PlayStation Vue was able to accomplish,” wrote Kodera, who stressed that the PlayStation 4 console is still a viable option to use OTT apps. “We had ambitious goals for how our service could change how people watch TV, showcasing PlayStation’s ability to innovate in a brand-new category within the Pay TV industry. We want to thank all of our customers, some of whom have been with us since PlayStation Vue’s launch in 2015.”

The closure of Vue marks Sony's second major retrenchment from an OTT platform this year, with the conglomerate divesting its interest in Crackle back in March. 

ESPN yesterday (Aug. 22) officially launched its much talked about ACC Network -- the latest college sports conference to launch a stand-alone network -- along with the requisite criticisms about lack of distribution deals with some major cable and satellite companies.

Much like with its predecessors the Pac-12 Networks, SEC Network and the Big Ten Network, a lot has been written about the ACC Network’s struggle to sign carriage deals with all top distributors, as Comcast (Xfinity) and Cox Communications and satellite-TV service Dish Network are sitting on the sidelines for the launch. Those distributors serve many of the areas within the ACC footprint, which includes 15 colleges stretching across much of the east coast including 2019 NCAA college basketball champion Virginia Cavaliers and college football champion Clemson Tigers.

Industry experts say however, that unlike previous college conference-based networks, the ACC has benefited from the advent of virtual MVPDs. Network carriage deals with Playstation Vue, Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV have provided the network with a national footprint, allowing sports fans digital access to the ACC Network anywhere in the country, irrespective of deals with cable and satellite service providers. ESPN does have distribution deals with Charter (Spectrum), Altice USA (Optimum and Suddenlink), Verizon Fios, DirecTV and NCTC members. And while ACC is on DirecTV, it's not on AT&T's vMVPD, AT&T TV Now. 

“Unfortunately when traditional sports media covers network launches they tend to go at it from the standpoint of someone’s local cable or satellite system, and figure if its not on that [service] then nobody can get the network,” said sports consultant Lee Berke. “The reality is that the ACC Network can be obtained nationally on these virtual MVPDs -- everyone in the footprint of the ACC Network can obtain the network if they want to buy a virtual MVPD that carries the network. Is everyone going to go that route and drop their cable subscriptions? No, but it is available to anyone who wants to see it.”

Indeed, ESPN senior vice president of college networks Rosalyn Durant said in a recent ACC Network conference call that ESPN is “very pleased with the distribution agreements that we have in place currently,” referencing deals with virtual MVPDs that can “cover the ACC footprint and beyond the footprint.”

The ACC Network -- which industry sources say costs around $1 for distributors within the ACC Conference footprint and around half that outside the footprint -- will offer approximately 450 live contests including 40 regular-season football games, 150 men’s and women’s basketball games, and 200 other regular-season competitions and tournament games annually from across the conference’s 27 sponsored sports, according to network officials.

ESPN, which has a long-term rights deal for all ACC conference events for much of the next two decades, will distribute most of the conference's marquee college football and college basketball games on ESPN and ABC, with the ACC carrying the lion’s share of other live event and shoulder programming from the conference, said industry observers.

The existence of vMVPDs changes the strategy of how distribution deals are done, according to Berke. ESPN now can wait until exiting deals with MVPDs are renewed to package in the ACC Network while still providing the conference’s sports fans with access to the channel through the $50 per month PlayStation Vue, Hulu + Live TV and YouTube TV. Prior to the advent of vMVPDs, a new network's distribution success was beholden to traditional distributors to reach their target audiences.

“The media landscape now is vastly different than it was five years ago with our last linear network launch,” ESPN's Durant said. “How we think about success for a network launch is the same. It's about having ... a multiplicity of providers, and we've always had the traditional. Now we also have the streaming providers to add to that mix.”

Obviously ESPN’s ultimate goal is to have full carriage for the ACC Network across all linear and digital distributors. The virtual MVPDs allow the network to reach fans while negotiations continue, according to ESPN. “So while we are incredibly pleased with the options that we have in place with our streaming partners and others, we are confident that there will be other announcements in the very near future,” Durant said.

Sony’s PlayStation Vue streaming service has become the first virtual pay TV platform to become available through the Apple TV app, the native application for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV devices.

The Vue app has been available for Apple's iOS and tvOS devices for some time. But this still matters to owners of those devices, since they don’t have to toggle between separate apps to find their programming. Users still need to download the Vue app to their device and log into their account. However, once they do, the Apple TV app will pull all of the live and on-demand programming they get through Vue and place it into relevant Apple TV buckets.

Related: Sony Adds 200 Locals to PlayStation Vue, Stays in vMVPD Fight

For example, on-demand content will all be placed into the “Watch Now” section of the Apple TV app, while shows a viewer has already started will be available in the “Up Next” bucket.

The Apple TV app has supported TV Everywhere apps from individual programmers like CBS and AMC for some time. But to import the content into the Apple TV app, users had to download each TVE app they wanted and authenticate their multi-channel subscription.

Notably, once users select content pulled from Vue, the Apple TV app will direct the user back to the Vue app. That’s how the Apple TV app works for content from other devices, as well.

Vue is an outlier among vMVPDs, with others hesitant to give up control of the user experience. But Vue could certainly use a good user experience edge in a competitive market.

Vue launched more than three years ago, but according to Strategy Analytics estimates released over the summer, only has around 745,000 subscribers. 

Having introduced itself all the way back in January 2016 at CES, at a time when the virtual MVPD market was at its infancy, Atlanta-based OTT start-up Vidgo has finally announced pricing and packaging for its live-streamed service.

The company has identified a niche in the Latino market, and is offering three vaguely sketched out product tiers for its vMVPD: the $19.99-a-month “Latino” bundle with “20 channels of the most popular Spanish entertainment and sports channels from Latin America”; the $29.99 Latino Mas package with “30 channels from the USA, Central and South America, and Spain”; and the $39.99 Core tier, which has few details.

Vidgo CEO Shane Cannon told Light Reading that his company will offer a slate of live and VOD programming consisting of both local broadcast and cable channels, with cloud DVR. The service will be playable, he said, on iOS and Android mobile devices, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

Vidgo hasn’t announced a launch date, but tweeted back on Sept. 1, “Internal Beta underway in preparation for launch.”

Truly, this startup has walked a long road.

In April, Vidgo Cannon touched on the company’s target market while announcing a deal with Harmonic to use the vendor’s VOS media processing platform.

“We’ve identified a significant underserved market in the United States, with millions of consumers that are currently not part of the pay TV ecosystem,” Cannon said.

Vidgo’s Crunchbase profile lists the company being founded in 2017 and receiving $500,000 in private funding to date.

However, at CES 2016, company cofounder Robert Kostensky, a former DirecTV sales and and distribution executive, told reporters that he and another unnamed cofounder had been developing the start-up for the previous seven years, and that Vidgo was preparing to launch in 15 cities.

"We're just dotting the I's and crossing the T's," Kostenky said at the time. Kostenksy is now working for Atlanta-based consulting firm Last Mile Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile, having departed Vidgo in August 2017.

At the time, the only vMVPDs in the market were Dish Network’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue. The virtual pay TV market, however, now has nearly a dozen participants.

Cannon, meanwhile, is a former AT&T wireless executive who is listed on LinkedIn as having joined Vidgo in 2015 as chief marketing officer. He was named CEO in January. 

Sony Corp. has debuted a new remote control for its PlayStation 4 console, one more adept at lean-back TV watching than game play.

And with the debut of the $30 Cloud Remote, Sony is offering a free 30-day trial of its virtual MVPD service, PlayStation Vue.

The new device pairs with the console via BlueTooth and can also control certain TV monitor functions including volume and power.

Related: PlayStation Vue Busts Out

The handheld device can be used in lieu of PS4’s native DualShock 4 controller, which is more fit for gaming. It will hit the market on September 19, available only at GameStop locations and on Amazon.

According to figures released by Strategy Analysts, PlayStation Vue ranges as the fourth biggest vMVPD, amassing around 745,000 subscribers since it debuted in 2015.

Among the major virtual pay TV services, Vue’s year-over-year growth of 59.4% is the second slowest next to market leader Sling TV, which expanded by only 25.9% from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018. 

If the virtual MVPD market is headed for a shakeout, Sony doesn’t expect its entry, PlayStation Vue, to be one of the services that doesn’t make it.

RELATED: Virtual Pay TV Market Set for a Shakeout: Analyst

Sony has no plans to shut down PS Vue, as it is bringing in useful user data, Sony’s CEO Kenichiro Yoshida told reporters, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Speculation about the future of PS Vue swirled this week when a presentation (PDF) given at Sony’s investors relations day characterized that the market and future business model for PS Vue “remains uncertain.” Sony also said that market growth for PlayStation VR is below expectations, but added that utilizing those businesses to strengthen user engagement is also key.

News out of Sony this week also centered on word that the PS4 is in its “final phase,” which in reality means that the next iteration of the platform is still three years out. Notably, the majority of PS Vue streaming now occurs on non-PlayStation devices.

What is more certain is that Sony’s OTT TV service will continue to find new ways to get local programming to subscribers, as PS Vue announced it is now offering a new national live Fox feed in 34 markets that arrive in the wake of a dispute with Sinclair that resulted in the loss of Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC feeds in some areas.

Sony has not releases subscriber figures for PS Vue, which launched in March 2013 and is believed to be trailing behind other OTT TV services such as DirecTV Now and Sling TV.

However, from a customer satisfaction standpoint, it’s in the right video category – streaming.

RELATED: YouTube TV is Losing Money, But is There a Path to Profit?

Consumers are more satisfied with video streaming services such as Netflix and PlayStation Vue than they are with traditional TV services – and leading by a big margin – according to a new report from The American Customer Satisfaction Index.

The 2018 version of the ACSI Telecommunications Report, found that overall customer satisfaction with subscription TV services fell 3.1% to a score of 62 (out of a possible 100), an 11-year low.

By comparison, video streaming services, which includes SVODs and virtual MVPDs, pulled in a score of 75.

Netflix, PS Vue and Twitch led the streaming group with a score of 78.

Among traditional pay TV services, AT&T U-verse topped the charts in 2018 with a score of 70, followed by Verizon Fios TV (68), Dish (67) and DirecTV satellite TV (64). Optimum (Altice USA) was the highest-scoring cable operator with a 62, down from 66 in 2017.

Among the pay TV group, picture quality got high marks, with call center satisfaction on the opposite end

The disparity in customer satisfaction comes as people continue to defect to lower-cost online video services alongside OTT experiences that have “fundamentally changed buyer expectations,” ACSI said.

“OTT operators have raised the bar by providing greater personalization, lower prices, more mobility – and much better customer service,” ACSI said in the report. 

Las Vegas -- The origins of PlayStation Vue, initially launched to a set of U.S. markets about three years ago, are rooted to PlayStation 3 and 4 consoles, but adoption of Sony’s OTT TV service has rapidly expanded to other supported streaming platforms.  

In fact, about 70% of streaming of the PS Vue service now takes place on non-PlayStation devices, Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PlayStation Vue (pictured), said here Wednesday (April 11) at the NAB Show’s inaugural Streaming Summit. 

In addition to the PS3 and PS4, PlayStation Vue, considered a whole-home offering because it allows for up to five simultaneous streams per account, is supported on Android TV devices, Apple TV boxes, Amazon Fire TV devices, Roku players and Roku TVs, Chromecast streaming adapters, web browsers, and Android and iOS mobile devices.  

Among other stats, Benefield said PS Vue subs average five hours plus per session, with live TV making up 80% of viewing time on the streaming service.  

Looking back, Benefield recalled that PS Vue started in select cities where it could offer access to certain local TV broadcasts, but later launched a version of the service under the “Slim” moniker that provided PS Vue a national reach (and included next day VOD access to certain broadcast TV shows) and way to enter markets where PS Vue didn’t offer live locals.  

Slim, which cost $10 less per month, was “surprisingly successful,” Benefield said.  

Local TV is “valuable, but it’s not a make-or-break…I think [OTT TV] services can succeed without broadcast,” he added, noting that many consumers still have the option to get those channels with an antenna.  

PS Vue offers four pay TV packages, but also tries to differentiate with its cloud DVR service, multi-view capability (allowing viewers to watch up to three linear channels at once), and by offering a la carte access to services such as HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, Fox Soccer Plus, and Epix Hits.  

“There is value in the bundle,” Benefield said in a keynote conversation with Dan Rayburn, conference chairman of the NAB Streaming Summit. “As it does fray, you’ll see us add more a la cartes.”  

Benefield was also asked about the challenges ahead as PS Vue faces off with a growing number of virtual MVPDs that today includes DirecTV Now, Hulu, YouTube TV, fuboTV, with a couple more on deck from T-Mobile (via its acquisition of Layer3 TV) and Vidgo.  

RELATED: Vidgo IDs Two OTT Tech Partners  

While the addition of new players raises awareness that consumers have live TV streaming options, he likewise he doesn’t expect many more to jump into the game.  

“This is not a faint-of-heart business,” Benefield said.  

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Mobilizes More Features 

He said PS Vue, which continues to add more live local TV feeds in various markets, has plans to bring more enhancements and features to the service, but declined to detail them. However, he said PS Vue updates its apps every two to three weeks.  

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Despite this being the “Golden Age of Television,” Benefield also expects there to be a winnowing of some channels that are unable to put in the investment to continue creating enough high quality content to sustain a 24/7 offering.

He also pointed out that MVPDs, including OTT-delivered ones, are also benefiting from stacking rights of TV show that are continuing to pivot more toward the pay TV ecosystem and away, to some degree, from SVOD services. 

Sony has introduced a set of mobile-facing features to PlayStation Vue, its OTT TV service, based in part on subscriber feedback.

Mobile Sign-Up: New customers can sign up for PS Vue directly from PSVue.com (on phones, tablets and PCs), even if they are outside the home.

In-Home Regional Sports Network Access: Subs can now access supported regional sports networks when they are travelling to another city.

Out-of-Home Local Broadcast Station Access: When travelling with a PS Vue-supported device, subscribers can watch the local broadcast channels that are available in the city that they're visiting.

PS Vue has not released subscriber numbers, but The Diffusion Group estimates that it had about 600,000 as of the end of 2017.

RELATED: Virtual MVPDs Ended 2017 with 5.3M Subs: Study

Although virtual MVPDs are focused on delivering slimmed-down TV channel bundles, DirecTV Now’s “Just Right” package appears to be the most aligned when it comes to delivering a mix of the “core channels” consumers desire most, TiVo found in its Q2 2017 Online Video and Pay TV Trends study.

The lineups of the OTT TV players analyzed in the new study (YouTube TV, Hulu, Sling TV and DirecTV Now) have considerable overlap, but TiVo found that DirecTV Now’s Just Right package delivers 85% of “core channel coverage,” followed by its “Live a Little” package (66.7%), Sling TV’s Orange/Blue combo package (66.7%), Hulu's new live TV offering  (63%), PlayStation Vue (59.3%), Sling TV Orange (55.6%), Sling TV Blue (44.4%) and YouTube TV (37%).

TiVo’s Data Science Team built this model by generating seven statistically significant bundles based on the most commonly selected à la carte channels and cross-referencing them with existing virtual MVPD services and packages. Beyond getting a fix on what those "core" channels are, TiVo's analysis also uncovered three key trends/groups: Sports, Lifestyle/Travel and Kids.

Related: Virtual MVPDs Crank Up the Marketing Heat

DirecTV Now’s packages “contain the most channels among the OTT bundles analyzed, and therefore score high on coverage metrics,” TiVo said. “While this may not be in the spirit of a true ‘skinny’ bundle, it does represent consumers’ desires and behavior.”

With all of those OTT TV providers factored in TiVo said their skinny bundles only match the preferences of 43.6% of respondents.

TiVo’s suggestion is that virtual MVPDs should build their slimmed-down packages based on interests or viewing behavior, offering, for example a 35-channel package for sports fans, or a similar one for travel enthusiasts or kids.

“While some channels would overlap, the overall packages would be much more tailored to the individual, returning to a true à la carte spirit,” the company said.

Though virtual MVPDs tend to be focused on skinny bundles tailored for a segment of the pay TV universe, the trend isn’t lost on more traditional MVPDs, including Comcast and its beta launch of Xfinity Instant TV, whose core package of local broadcast TV is complemented by a range of genre-focused add-on packages.

RELATED: Comcast Rolls Out ‘Xfinity Instant TV’ Beta

TiVo’s study, based on a survey of 3,069 adults in the U.S. and Canada, also found that most consumers (77.5%) want an a la carte option that lets them pay only for the channels they watch. They’d also be willing to pay $28.79 per month for a package of self-selected channels, or $1.73 per channel. On average, respondents said 19 channels would make up their “ideal” lineup.

The top five channels they’d be willing to pay for: HBO ($2.58), Tennis Channel ($2.45), Fusion ($2.38), Telemundo ($2.31) and Showtime ($2.21). The most popular channel, selected by all respondents, was ABC, followed by Discovery Channel, CBS, History, and Fox.

Per the survey, 22% said they had cancelled TV service in the past 12 months, up 4.8 year-over-year, while antenna use to access basic TV channels has jumped 12.4% over a two-year period.

The top three reasons for frustration with pay TV continue to be costs, poor service, and poor customer service.

On the churn front, of the 83.9% of respondents who do get pay TV, 8.9% have switched providers in the last three months. When asked if they intend to leave their current provider in the next six months, 6.3% plan to cut their current service, 8.1% expected to switch to another pay TV provider, and 4.5% planned to switch to an online service or app.

Use of voice search is also on the rise, as 10.9% said they use it to find something to watch on TV, and 19.3% said they want voice search functionality.

Among those that have voice search, 87.4% use it weekly, and 31.4% said they use it to conduct four to seven searches per week.

Sony Interactive Entertainment America said it has notched a deal to offer PlayStation Vue, its OTT TV service, to customers of the 850-plus cable operators and other service providers that are members of the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC).  

RELATED: Complete Coverage of TIS17

The agreement comes during The Independent Show, being held this week in Indianapolis, and comes on the heels of a similar deal between the NCTC and fuboTV, another virtual MVPD that competes with PS Vue and others such as DirecTV Now, Sling TV, Hulu and YouTube TV.

RELATED: TIS17: NCTC Reaches Pact With FuboTV

Those deals are forming as members of the NCTC look for new ways to offer video services to broadband-only customers and to provide an option to consumers who have cut the cord on traditional pay TV services or have never taken a pay TV service. In turn, the deals could give OTT players more exposure to consumers who are seeking those alternatives and bump up their sub totals. 

Financial terms were not announced, but they said the deal with the NCTC, whose members represent more than 9 million U.S. subs, will give those co-op members the ability to “enhance their product portfolio with a new offering to reach broadband customers with differentiated packages and enhanced user experience."

“This is a great opportunity for customers to experience PlayStation Vue’s innovative cloud-based TV streaming service through their NCTC member provider,” Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PlayStation Vue for SIEA, said in a statement. “PlayStation Vue offers an incredible value to users, with more than 100 popular live national and local channels, a powerful user interface, and the ability to purchase channels a la carte without a bundle.”

“Our members are looking for ways to offer more video choice to their customers, and this new agreement allows them to do that,” added Rich Fickle, NCTC’s President and CEO, “NCTC understands the importance of pursuing new opportunities for the distribution of content, and we are excited to partner with such a strong brand.”

Sony launched PS Vue, initially in three markets, in March 2015, and has since expanded to feature a national offering that includes live local broadcast TV channels in certain markets as it signs more deals with affiliate groups, and next-day VOD access to their shows in others. Sony has not announced sub numbers for PS Vue.

PS Vue is currently supported on web browsers, PlayStation 4 and PS 3 consoles, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices, Android TV devices, iOS and Android smartphone and tablets, and is optimized for the Google Chromecast for iOS and Android.

Indicating further progress with broadcast station groups, PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT TV service, said it has added 17 local stations to its programming mix this week.

Availability of the following local network feeds from groups that include Tribune Broadcasting and Sinclair Broadcast Group is dependent on the market location of the PlayStation Vue subscriber:

-Baltimore - FOX 45

-Cleveland-Akron (Canton) - FOX 8

-Columbus, Ohio – FOX 28

-Denver - FOX 31

-Hartford and New Haven – FOX 61

-Indianapolis - FOX 59

-Kansas City – FOX 4

-Milwaukee – FOX 6

-Nashville – FOX 17

-Pittsburgh - FOX 53

-Portland, Ore. - FOX 12

-Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto  - FOX 40

-Salt Lake City – FOX 13

-San Antonio - FOX San Antonio

-San Diego - FOX 5

-Seattle-Tacoma - Q13 FOX

-St. Louis - FOX 2

PlayStation Vue is adding those local feeds amid increasingly heated competition from virtual MVPDs that include DirecTV Now, YouTube TV, Sling TV, fubo TV, and Hulu.

RELATED: OTT Skinny Bundles in 3.1M Homes: comScore

PlayStation Vue confirmed that it has dropped beIN Sports and beIN Sports en Español, as another virtual MVPD, fuboTV, wants to turn that programming decision into an opportunity.

Streaming Observer reported on the decision Wednesday, citing a message from PS Vue to subscribers that it would no longer carry those networks as of Thursday, June 8.

“Despite our best efforts, we were unable to come to an agreement on terms with the network,” a PS Vue official said in an emailed statement. beIN Sports has also been asked for comment. 

Update: beIN Sports issued this statement:

"For soccer fans and passionate viewers of the quality programming on beIN SPORTS, we regret to inform you we’ve reached an impasse involving our contract with Playstation Vue. Sony has refused to renew the contract with our channel and chosen to remove us from their PSVUE service. Because of this unilateral decision, our loyal subscribers like you will be deprived of access to beIN as of today. We made every possible effort to reach a deal with Sony since we believe the top sports leagues, games, insights and analysis should be made available to the largest possible audience of fans.  Regrettably, Sony has decided that our value proposition is not enough for their viewers."

beIN Sports is also encouraging PS Vue subs to call the OTT service and ask for the return of its channels.

PS Vue’s decision to drop beIN Sports follows another one last November to drop Viacom channels, including Comedy Central, Spike and MTV, while adding others, including BBC America, NBA TV and Vice.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Dropping Viacom Channels

The decision also reduces the number of virtual MVPDs that distribute beIN Sports.

Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT TV service, offers beIN Sports to customers on its Sling Orange and Sling Blue packages that also take its Sports Extra package, which runs an additional $5 per month.

Meanwhile, fuboTV, the sports-oriented vMVPD, has stepped into the breach with a limited-time offer of a 40% discount on fuboTV Premier, a package that includes beIN Sports, beIN Sports en Español, and access to beIN Sports Connect, for two months. fuboTV said it will run the promo through June 23, 2017.

FuboTV’s current regular price for the Premier package is $34.99 per month.

Other virtual MVPDs such as DirecTV Now, Hulu and YouTube TV currently do not offer beIN Sports.

While traditional Pay TV operators have generally suffered customer declines due to new virtual MVPDs and other over-the-top providers, those very same newcomers have offset losses for the big programmers.

For at least the past two years, most cable programmers have seen traditional TV carriage dip about 2% annually as customers either drop service, reduce their programming packages or take their money elsewhere. The growing number of competitors — the latest, Hulu Live TV, launched its beta-test version last week (see Cover Story) — has steadily chipped away subscriber rolls at the top pay TV distributors.

Comcast, the only major cable operator that gained basic video subscribers last year (161,000) and in the first quarter (42,000) did so largely through retention efforts and the rollout of its next-generation X1 platform. X1 also has given customers better access to subscription video-on-demand services; X1 includes an embedded app for Netflix with others likely to follow.

In April, Comcast launched a wireless service, Xfinity Mobile, that should also boost those retention efforts.

On the programming side, some content providers are the streamlined services counteract losses resulting from their networks being part of a larger pay TV bundle.

Time Warner Inc. chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes said on an earnings call last Wednesday that virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs) are having an impact. “It’s mitigating some of the declines at the traditional providers,” he said. “So, if new offerings can combine that kind of attractive pricing and packaging with the sort of new 21st century on-demand platforms, interfaces, then we think they can definitely attract new subs into the network system. And that’s a great opportunity for Turner and every other network to find its natural audience.”

CBS chairman and CEO Les Moonves said the company will bundle its CBS All Access and Showtime OTT offerings for the first time this year while continuing to offer them separately. For any skinny bundle to survive, he said, it must include the CBS network.

“We are not being affected in any way by any changes in subscription numbers throughout the industry,” Moonves said on the call.

While consumers seem ready to drop premium channels such as HBO, Showtime and Starz from their traditional pay TV packages, they’re snapping them up through other avenues, Morgan Stanley media analyst Ben Swinburne found in a recent report.

In a recent survey of about 3,100 pay TV customers, Swinburne noted that premium uptake is down so far this year compared with last year — about 46% of respondents said they had at least one premium network, vs. 53% in 2016. But he still predicted premium network subscribers would be up in 2017, as they have been for the past five years, due mainly to digital distribution.

Every premium channel has a digital direct-to-consumer counterpart, which also stems the losses. And the vMVPD field, once occupied solely by Sling TV (which launched in 2015), has become increasingly crowded.

In addition to apps from individual networks, services like CBS All Access, Sony PlayStation Vue, DirecTV Now and YouTube TV are increasingly gaining customers. Swinburne estimated by the end of this year, virtual MVPDs will have 3 million subscribers.

Hulu Live’s launch is another sign of increased vMVPD traction, Swinburne said. “Notably, we believe Hulu should benefit from its existing, scaled direct-to-consumer subscriber base and its ability to drive advanced advertising innovation,” he said.

Hulu Live should do well because it will carry “gold” tier networks from The Walt Disney Co., CBS, NBCUniversal and Time Warner, as well as Scripps Networks Interactive’s three core channels of HGTV, Food Network and Travel Channel, said Swinburne. Hulu’s owners — Disney, Fox, NBCUniversal and Time Warner — should also “benefit from involvement in a new distribution platform as pay TV consumption continues to evolve,” he added.

Washington, D.C. -- "High speed data has years and years before showing signs of maturity," Cable One executive chairman Tom Might declared here Wednesday during a panel at the American Cable Association Summit

Echoing a growing view that over-the-top content is replacing traditional linear TV as a favored video source, especially among younger viewers,  Might said, "Were making more money on video today than we were five years ago," noting that about half of Cable One’s subscribers are focused on high-speed data service (HSD).

"We think over-the-top content is a great complement to our HSD-centric strategy," he said during a panel on "Leveraging Disruption in the Video Market." Might noted that Netflix service is integrated on Cable One’s TiVo boxes, but he admitted that "those are tough negotiations."

Might cited conversations with other independent cable operators here during ACA 24th annual Summit, with many of them skeptical about pulling back from linear video carriage. He said that Cable One applied Nielsen analytics to its services package starting about five years ago and found that "customers in some categories were not as profitable." 

"The psychographics of our own customer base" was surprising,  he confessed, but the company recognized that traditional customers were "largely going to competitors or satellite."  Moreover, about 10% had completely cut the cord.

With those findings, Cable One "had this Eureka! moment when we identified the value of different kinds of customers," he explained.

Might also said that with its digital plant in place, the company is better able to serve enterprise customers.

"Business services have grown at a steady rate and have a long road of opportunity ahead," he said.

Moderator Mark Robichaux (editorial director of NewBay Media's Multichannel News and Broadcasting & Cable) pointed out that in the last three quarters, "cord cutting is up and network ratings are down," observing that those factors may be contributing to operators' decisions to focus on broadband delivery services and "no longer pushing video."

RELATED: NCTC Accelerating OTT Content Packaging for Cable Ops

Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of Sony's PlayStation Vue, confirmed that he sees "a symbiotic relationship" between cable operators and OTT providers such as his.

By streaming Netflix, games, live TV, music and other services, "it helps drive acquisition for partners at a local level," Benefield said. He acknowledged that Sony is "talking to many companies in this room." 

Since PS Vue is not strictly tied to the PlayStation console for distribution, Benefield focused on the opportunities for cable delivery of its content. He claimed that, "We have more than 90% customer satisfaction levels."

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Bites Into Apple TV

Michael Smith, another panelist and professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, advised that operators could "look at marrying their brand to Vue, especially to reach the target demographic of 18-34 year olds."

Smith also recommended "not to think about Netflix as another channel."

"It is fundamentally a different business," he said. Smith is co-author of Streaming, Sharing, Stealing: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment, a new book that delves into Netflix role in the evolving market.

Too Many Commercials?

As for legacy video providers finding new roles in the evolving digital marketplace, Elisabeth Sami of NBC News identified a major challenge as "how to keep strong brand connections."  She also cautioned about the growing ad load on linear TV.

"The ad load today is harming our collective business as we compete with OTT services," said Sami, SVP-global strategy and business development of NBC News Group. "We need to reinvent what an advertisement will look like in the future.  There's talk about shortening ad pods by 30% and doing more target advertising. We're having to think about that a lot internally," she explained.

Although viewership on NBC's cable news as well as broadcast newscasts has climbed -- substantially due to interest in recent political developments -- Sami said that the networks "don't have a one-to-one connection" with viewers. 

"We're establishing them [viewer interactions] digitally," she explained, citing social media components that are now integrated into NBC News programming.

O'Rielly Seeks Operator Input  

Earlier in the program, FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly  focused on Open Internet/net neutrality, Business Data Services and policy reform. 

"I hope we can reopen the decision," O'Rielly said of the Title II ruling of the previous FCC majority. He said he disagrees with prioritization, noting that it was "incredibly problematic on how it tried to bifurcate the industry." 

O'Rielly characterized FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's efforts to "remove barriers" via process reform as "near and dear to my heart” and describing the effect of over-regulation as having "a unique and disproportionate effect on small businesses," which resonated well among the audience of small, independent cable operators.

During his onstage discussion with ACA president and CEO Matt Polka, O'Rielly (making his first-ever appearance at an ACA Summit) invited cable operators to tell the Commission, "What can we change to make your life easier - things that don't cause other industry segments to have a heart attack."   

O'Rielly said his goal is "to reduce the economic cost [and] to modernize our rules."

"Hopefully in this Commission, things will improve,” he said, and he smiled benignly when Polka reminded the Commissioner that he's now in the new majority.

Despite some gaping holes in its initial channel lineup, YouTube TV, the virtual MVPD set to launch later this year, is poised to enter the market as the still relatively small cord-cutting trend grows.

RELATED: YouTube Makes Virtual MVPD Play

With most major U.S. MVPD results in (Altice reports Q4 results on March 9), “it is clear that cord-cutting of legacy distribution services – that is, without including OTT-delivered virtual MVPD bundles like Sling TV and DirecTV Now (and soon, YouTube TV) – has at last meaningfully accelerated,” Craig Moffett, analyst with MoffettNathanson, wrote in his firm’s latest Pay TV Cord-Cutting Monitor report.

The U.S. pay TV industry shed 319,000 subs in Q4 versus a gain of 48,000 in the year-ago quarter. For the full year of 2016, the industry shrank by 1.7%, or by 1.7 million subs, versus 1.1%/1.1 million in 2015, Moffett said.

He added that U.S. Census Bureau data suggests that the cord-cutting trend is worse than that. New home formation in 2016 was 300,000 homes higher than the year before, or 800,000. Based on a national average penetration rate of 81% for pay TV, the expectation is that more than 600,000 of these 800,000 new homes to become pay TV subs. With that adjustment, there were closer to 2.5 million “lost or missing” pay TV subscribers in 2016.

 “It is hard not to credit the acceleration in cord-cutting in Q4 to DirecTV Now, which arrived on the scene in late November,” and added about 230,000 subs in the period, he said, but allowed that the promotional price had much to do with that early growth.

He estimates that Sling TV and DirecTV Now added 900,000 subs in 2016, taking the vMVPD total to more than 1.4 million, a figure that doesn't include estimates for PlayStation Vue, Sony's OTT TV service. 

But the bottom line on the trend toward cord-cutting and the rise of vMVPDs is that “price matters above all else,” Moffett wrote, later wondering if Hulu has no choice but to compete at a similarly low price as its OTT TV rivals. “The demand for VMPD services is largely a function of pricing.”

On that note, he said DirecTV Now, AT&T’s new OTT TV service, succeeded in adding customers, but also did what it’s not supposed to do – cannibalize pay TV subs. And that likely played a big role in why DirecTV Now’s promotional price of $35 per month on its “Go Big” package didn’t last long.

RELATED: DirecTV Now to Drop $35 Promotional Price for ‘Go Big’

fuboTV, a sports-oriented vMVPD, is now beta-testing a new, broader version of its service that’s starting off with a promotional price of $34.99 per month to attract early birds, but will eventually be raised to nearly $50 per month.

Richard Greenfield, analyst at BTIG, also observed in a blog post that these new OTT TV providers are not necessarily expanding the pie by attracting cord-cutters and cord-nevers.

“In reality, vMVPDs appear far better at cannibalizing legacy, facilities-based MVPD subscribers than luring back millennials who increasingly live in an on-demand world,” Greenfield wrote.

He also said the smaller and also uneven lineups of some vMVPD services are constraining demand, along with limited/impaired cloud DVR offerings, and challenges with creating a reliable, large-scale live OTT TV service.

But price remains paramount. YouTube TV will be bolting from the blocks with a $35 per month service that currently lacks channels from Time Warner, Viacom and Discovery Networks, to name a few.

“But the $35 price point for YouTube TV appears to be non-promotional, and there could be potentially be more channel announcements to come,” Moffett pointed out.

And those prices and options presented by vMVPDs are ultimately good news for consumers, Greenfield argued. “More choices at lower prices and without the crazy fees and surcharges should ultimately pressure legacy MVPDs to evolve and/or lose more and more subscribers to vMVPD offerings,” he wrote.

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, said it has added another batch of local CBS feeds within the last week.

The latest group to joing the PS Vue lineup, which follows the addition of dozens of other local CBS broadcast channels in recent weeks, includes CBS affiliates such as Cox Media Group Television, Meredith Corp., Gray Television, and Raycom Media, among others.

RELATED: More CBS Live Local Feeds Stream to PlayStation Vue

Here’s the full list of the latest additions:

-Dayton – WHIO TV

-Flint-Saginaw-Bay City – WNEM TV 5

-Jackson, Tenn. – WBBJ CBS 7

-Lexington – WKYT

-Lexington – Mountain News WYMT

-Montgomery-Selma – CBS 8

-Springfield-Holyoke – WSHM CBS 3

-Waco-Temple-Bryan – KBTX News

-Waco-Temple-Bryan – KWTX News 10

-Des Moines-Ames - KCCI

-Honolulu – Hawaii News Now: KGMB

-Louisville – CBS Louisville

-North Platte – KNPL

-Paducah-Cape Girard-Harsbg – KFVS12

-Presque Isle – WAGM

-Shreveport – KSLA News 12

-Toledo – WTOL

-Tucson (Sierra Vista) – CBS 13

-Amarillo – News Channel 10

-Baton Rouge – WAFB 9 News

-Biloxi-Gulfport – WLOX CBS 13

-Charleston, S.C. – Live 5 WCSC

-Elmira (Corning) – WENY CBS

-Erie – WSEE

-Reno – KTVN

-Savannah – WTOC 11

-Wichita Falls & Lawton – Newschannel 6

Pushing ahead with more carriage deals involving broadcast affiliates, PlayStation Vue said it has added another 20 local live feeds from CBS.

Earlier this month, PS Vue tacked on a different batch of 20 CBS live locals via carriage deals involving affiliates such as Griffin Communications, Gray Television, News Press & Gazette and Sinclair, among others.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Tacks on More Local CBS Feeds

PS Vue offers the live local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in their respective owned-and-operated markets, and continues to expand its access to CBS local feeds. In areas where it doesn’t offer certain live local broadcast TV feeds, PS Vue’s national “Slim” packages, launched last March, provide next-day, on-demand access to shows from those broadcasters.

PS Vue said the following CBS channels were added this week:

-Lincoln and Hastings-Krny, Neb. – 10/11 Now

-Tallahassee-Thomasville, Fla. – WCTV

-Augusta-Aiken, Ga. – WRDW 12

-Fargo-Valley City, N.D. – Valley News Live

-Wausau-Rhinelander, Wis. – WSAW

-Topeka, Kan. – 13 WIBW

-Rockford, Ill. – 23 WIFR

-Monroe-El Dorado, La. – KNOE 8 News

-Odessa-Midland, Texas. – CBS 7

-Albany, Ga. - WSWG

-Dothan, Ala. – WTVY-TV

-Cheyenne-Scottsbluff, Wyo. – CBS Newschannel 5

-Alexandria, La. – CBS Channel 2

-Sherman-Ada – CBS 12

-Laredo, Texas – CBS Laredo

-Twin Falls, Idaho – KMVT 11

-Panama City – Local 18 News

-Charlottesville, Va. – WCAV TV

-Harrisonburg, Va. – The V

-Parkersburg, W.V. – The Newscenter

Expanding on its deals with CBS affiliates such as Griffin Communications, Gray Television, News Press & Gazette and Sinclair, PlayStation Vue said it has added another 20 local CBS stations to the Sony-run OTT-TV service.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Expands Access to CBS Live Local Feeds

Here are the latest to come on board this week (Updated with station affiliate info): 

-Oklahoma City – News 9 (Griffin Communications) 

-Tulsa – News On 6 (Griffin) 

-Albany-Schenectady-Troy – CBS 6 (Sinclair) 

-Ft. Myers-Naples – WINK-TV (Ft. Myers Broadcasting) 

-Portland-Auburn – CBS 13 (Sinclair) 

-Harlingen-Wslco-Brnsvl-Mca – CBS 4 (Sinclair) 

-Cedar Rapids-Waterloo-Iowa City-Dubuque – CBS 2 (Sinclair) 

-El Paso (Las Cruces) – CBS 4 (Sinclair) 

-South Bend-Elkhart – WSBT 22 (Sinclair) 

-Burlington-Plattsburgh – WCAX (Mt. Mansfield) 

-Traverse City-Cadillac – 9&10 News (Heritage) 

-Santa Barbara-Santa Maria – San Luis Obispo – KCOY 12 (Vista West Media) 

-Monterey-Salinas – KION News Channel 5 (News-Press & Gazette) 

-Salisbury – WBOC 16 (Draper) 

-Palm Springs – CBS Local 2 (News-Press & Gazette) 

-Idaho Falls-Pocatello-Jackson – KIDK 3 (Vista West Media) 

-Knoxville – Local 8 News (Gray) 

-Wichita-Hutchinson Plus – KWCH 12 (Gray) 

-Roanoke-Lynchburg – WDBJ 7 (Gray) 

-Colorado Springs-Pueblo – KKTV 11 (Gray) 

PS Vue offers the live local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in their respective owned-and-operated markets, and recently has been adding CBS local feeds from other broadcast groups, including Sinclair, Raycom, Meredith Corp., and Midwest Television, in certain markets.

In areas where it doesn’t offer certain live local broadcast TV feeds, PS Vue’s national “Slim” packages, launched last March, provide next-day, on-demand access to shows from those broadcasters.

Hulu recently signed a deal with CBS for an OTT TV service that will debut soon and compete with other virtual MVPD offerings that include PS Vue, DirecTV Now and Sling TV.

RELATED: Hulu Sneaks a Peek at OTT TV Service

PS Vue supports several streaming platforms, including Apple TV (fourth generation), Web browsers, Android TV devices, PS4 and PS3 consoles, Roku devices, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

Related > Viewer Watch 2017: Download the Complete Report

Though TV has long been a numbers game, hard data showing changes in the way consumers access video remains a hotly debated subject.

It’s not just that there’s considerable disagreement over how to interpret these changes among executives overseeing what Magna calls the $67 billion TV ad market and PwC describes as the $101 billion subscription pay TV business. There is also much grumbling over the kind of data that is available to answer these multibillion-dollar questions.

“I don’t think we’ve made as much progress as we should have made” in measuring the consumption of video on all platforms and devices, Turner Broadcasting System chief research officer Howard Shimmel said.

There also isn’t much agreement on how the growth in multiplatform video consumption will affect pay TV subscriptions. Some contend that the rise of over-the-top streaming options will sharply reduce the pay TV subscriber ranks; others believe the issue is much more complex.

“From its peak in the first quarter of 2012, the major providers have lost about 1.8 million subscribers,” Bruce Leichtman, president and principal analyst at Leichtman Research Group, said. “The industry is clearly saturated and in a slow decline.”

Interpreting those numbers remains controversial, in part because data on the size of the pay TV universe rests on different assumptions. Leichtman, for example, includes data from services like Sling TV in his company’s estimates, while SNL Kagan does not.

Nielsen also provides different numbers. It reports the number of homes that have TVs connected to a pay TV service, which is different than the number of total pay TV subscribers reported by operators, Nielsen executive vice president of research Glenn Enoch said.

“You have to be very careful about the numbers you use and [about] drawing a straight line from those numbers to revenue, because things are much more complicated than that,” he said.

Related > New Normal: Digital Distribution

CORD-CUTTING CALCULUS

A number of researchers agreed. The proportion of “people dropping pay TV subscriptions is now about 2.6%,” Leichtman noted, which is about the same rate as 10 years ago, when the industry was growing.

“The problem is that the number of new customers has declined,” Leichtman said. “We only see 1% [of homes] moving into pay TV. That is down from 3.5% a decade ago and it has had a real impact on the dynamics of the pay TV industry.”

The declines have been smaller than some had expected, SNL Kagan research director Ian Olgeirson noted. “We are seeing a slight acceleration in the decline in subscribers for multichannel services from a roughly 1% decline in 2015 to a decline of what will probably be 1.3% or 1.4% in 2016,” he said.

The causes of those declines are also hotly debated. “Service providers would say that a lot of those declines are driven by price” and economics, Olgeirson said. But that isn’t the whole story, as the economy has rebounded and housing starts have grown over the past two years, he said.

A recent Frank N. Magid Assoicates survey found that 75% of likely cord-cutters said the ability to watch content via the Internet and OTT platforms was a key reason to drop pay TV service, Magid Advisors president Mike Vorhaus said. Only 29% of respondents cited costs.

Research also challenges the prevailing assumption that pay TV and SVOD services are competing offerings, said Howard Horowitz, president and founder of Horowitz Research, who sees them as complementary to traditional pay TV.

Horowitz survey data shows that 52% of whites and 58% of Hispanics have both a multichannel subscription and a subscription VOD service, while only 5% of whites and 6% of Hispanics have just a SVOD service.

STAGNANT AD SPENDING

Much unease also surrounds the ad market. Brian Wieser, senior research analyst, advertising at Pivotal Research Group, said the economy faces considerable uncertainty over the next year.

“I don’t think anyone can say with any certainty what is going to happen next and that uncertainty is going to curtail advertising,” he said.

National TV ad revenue will drop slightly by 0.4% in 2017 to $44.6 billion, Wieser predicted, and remain essentially flat through 2020, when it will hit $45.2 billion.

Magna’s Letang also sees a weak TV ad market combined with bullish prospects for digital media. “In 2017, we see high single digital inflation [in pricing] but high single-digit declines in ratings,” Letang said. “National TV will be up 1% in 2017 from 2016 if you exclude P&O” — meaning the 2016 revenue from political ads and the Summer Olympics — “and down 1% if you include P&O.”

With political and Olympics spending included, Magna projects that total TV spending will drop by 4.8% to $64.2 billion in 2017, declining further to about $62.2 billion in 2021.

Digital spending, though, will continue to grow rapidly. By 2020, Magna forecasts that mobile advertising will more than double to $78.4 billion (38.2% of all advertising) and social media will hit $31.8 billion in 2020 (a 15.5% share). TV, meanwhile, will slip to a 32.4% share.

Given the uncertainty over the ad market and pay TV subscriptions, programmers and operators have been rethinking their operations.

NEED TO BE NIMBLE

The drive to adapt to new consumer habits has prompted a number of projects to make operations more nimble, Discovery Communications chief technology officer John Honeycutt said.

For example, Discovery’s recently deployed “On Ramp” project allows about 80% of the content produced by 600 production suppliers to be uploaded to the Amazon cloud, where it can be immediately available to Discovery employees and channels all around the world.

“Going from 0% to 80% makes us so much more flexible and efficient,” Honeycutt said.

Equally dramatic upgrades are occurring in the pay TV infrastructure. After ticking off a long list of new products and initiatives to deliver more content to more devices, Comcast Cable executive vice president, general manager, video and entertainment services Matthew Strauss noted that these efforts are built on major improvements to the MSO’s infrastructure.

“We are rolling out DOCSIS 3.1,” he said. “We are rolling out Gigabit speeds. We are transitioning more and more to all-IP, which will allow us to innovate and deliver more of these newer services.”

Rapid innovation has also become the norm for digital platforms. “In 2016, we launched 30 new products and made hundreds of enhancements on dozens of platforms,” Alex Wellen, senior vice president and chief product officer at CNN, said.

Much remains to be done, particularly in the area of measurement. This year will mark a notable improvement on that front, with Nielsen planning to begin syndicating its Total Content Ratings on March 1.

“But some of the networks have been saying they won’t be ready for Nielsen’s public rollout in March, and it isn’t clear if everything will be ready in time for the upfronts,” Jane Clarke, CEO and managing director of the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM), said. “It is a very complex process to get it implemented in the apps for every kind of player and all the devices.”

Others worry about the TV industry’s ability to maintain its share of ad spending without better data. “Measuring crossplatform video consumption is important, but it is a 2006 problem,” Turner’s Shimmel said. “Today, when we talk to advertisers, what they really care about is outcomes [such as sales] and I don’t see that kind of measurement anywhere in Nielsen or comScore’s future.”

More debates surround commonly held perceptions of the OTT market.

Michael Leszega, senior analyst of market intelligence at Magna, said that “in 2016, we have [more than] 25 million cord-cutters and cord-nevers,” and that this group will continue to grow. By 2020, he predicted, about 28.6% of all households will be outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem. “It is a sizable portion of the population that can’t be ignored,” he said.

That has prompted a number of companies to develop streaming bundles of channels like Dish Network’s Sling TV, Hulu, Sony’s PlayStation Vue and AT&T’s DirecTV Now.

“If you look at the rumors about Amazon or YouTube coming out with OTT bundles, there could be a whole bunch of them, maybe seven or eight by the end of 2017,” Steve Shannon, general manager of content and services at Roku, said.

Tony Goncalves, senior vice president of strategy and business development for AT&T Entertainment Group, described DirecTV Now “as a mobile-first-centric platform” that will deliver the kind of advanced digital features consumers expect from their mobile apps.

“DirecTV Now is pay TV as an app and it opens up a market that has not historically been addressed by pay TV,” he said.

Dish Network also sees great promise in the melding of pay TV packages, OTT delivery and app experiences, Niraj Desai, the company’s vice president of product management, said.

“TV is becoming an app,” he said. “We have been talking about that trend for a while, but 2016 was really the year TV as an app came into its own” with better TV everywhere offerings and the streaming OTT bundles such as Dish’s Sling TV and DirecTV Now.

COMPLEMENTARY PLAYS

Even better, these products open up new markets and are not designed to cannibalize traditional pay TV offerings, he added. “Sling is complementary to DBS,” he said, meaning Dish and DirecTV’s satellite-TV platforms. “Sling over-indexes with urban millennials and DBS resonates with suburban and more rural customers that are more traditional TV watchers.”

Similar views come from programmers that have aggressively targeted consumers without traditional multichannel TV subscriptions.

“We launched HBO Now with the theory that its subscribers were going to look very different from the traditional subscribers,” Bernadette Aulestia, executive vice president of worldwide distribution at HBO, said of the premium programmer’s standalone app.

HBO Now subscribers are 10 years younger than customers of HBO’s premium cable network and typically live in broadband-only households, she said.

“We look at it as an entry point to customers that are coming into the category,” Aulestia said.

The growing popularity of skinny bundles and streaming OTT offerings has also helped HBO’s premium pay TV business, she added.

“There was a time, as a premium service, that we were only sold at the top of the bundle,” Aulestia said. “The idea that HBO should be sold at every level of the bundle, and even as a standalone service, means there are fewer barriers to get HBO.”

The rise of OTT and skinny bundles has been more worrying for ad-supported networks.

“Getting more creative packaging of content to create more customized solutions for the consumer can be very challenging for content providers because you have increasingly fragmented audiences,” Joe Atkinson, technology, infocomm, entertainment and media advisory leader at consultancy PwC, said.

Atkinson and others said OTT distribution can also open up a number of new opportunities.

For instance, the growing SVOD market encouraged Turner’s recent launch of an OTT movie service called FilmStruck, Coleman Breland, president of Turner Content Distribution and president of TCM, said.

“As the bundle became tighter, we decided to go direct to consumer instead of trying to launch a linear network and push it through the ecosystem,” which would be difficult in the current pay TV environment, he said.

Turner has also been pushing to expand the content made available on all platforms both in terms of reach and quantity, with the addition of offerings like full seasons on-demand.

“We now have 450 affiliate partners for our TV everywhere products” and have seen usage jump by “triple digits” in the last year, Breland said.

TIME TO TARGET

Many of these newer products can be traced to a more fundamental change in the way operators think about their customers.

“Today, service providers have to figure out how to target different individuals in household,” PwC’s Atkinson said. “That is a tough challenge, but I think it is really the keys to the kingdom.”

One example of such a targeting effort is the development of packages targeted to consumers at different life stages. “College students have different needs than a single-family home with kids, and we are very focused on meeting all those different needs,” Comcast’s Strauss said. He said the Xfinity on Campus product has been a success in that regard.

Operators have also been greatly expanding the content sources via apps on Internet connected set-top devices such as Dish Network’s Hopper. “You can watch live TV with your Dish subscription, or recorded TV on your DVR or you can watch Netflix and YouTube all in one convenient place,” Dish’s Desai said.

Adding more choices has also been a top priority for Cox Communications, Steve Necessary, executive vice president of product development and management at the Atlanta-based cable operator, said. “We have more than doubled our VOD offerings from 50,000 to over 120,000,” he said.

Cox also has revamped its TV app to expand the content available on digital devices and speeded up the rollout of Contour — Cox’s version of the Comcast X1 Internet-connected set-top platform — from 3,000 customers to more than 600,000 in 2016.

Very importantly, such efforts are also beginning to pay off. Both Comcast and Cox are seeing some of their best video-subscriber efforts in a decade.

Programmers are also reporting strong gains from their digital platforms.

“There is a blending of content types and expansion of the platforms,” translating into some record-setting numbers, ESPN vice president of digital media research and analytics Dave Coletti said.

In year when some live sports audiences have declined, Coletti noted that Watch ESPN’s live stream of the Nov. 26 college-football game between third-ranked Michigan and second-ranked Ohio State — which went into double overtime before OSU prevailed, 30-27 — tallied 1,273,000 unique viewers, making it ESPN’s most streamed regular college football game. (The game telecast also aired on ABC.)

“Eight of our top 10 most-streamed regular season college football games have occurred this year,” he noted.

The 2016 presidential election helped CNN set a number of network records, Wellen said, including a record audience level on Nov. 9 with 77 million unique users, 83 million video starts, 483 million page views and 29 million live streams.

Equally notable was social media. CNN racked up 169.7 million video views on Facebook and 47.6 million Facebook Live views, he said.

“Those results show that it has become very important to be both a destination for content and a distributed brand,” he said. “We have apps and websites where people can access our content but, we’ve also seen that we can be very successful on Facebook Live” and other outside platforms.

Additional encouraging news can be found in TV use, Nielsen’s Enoch said. “The decreases that we saw in TV usage that really started to accelerate in the mid-2014 have lessened,” he said. “TV consumption remains at near record level.”

“We are also seeing a shift back to the more traditional way of hooking up a TV” to a pay TV service or an antenna, he added. “The universe of homes that can watch TV or can stream video to the big screen has actually grown,” reversing a trend that began with the digital transition and the 2008 recession.

That said, Enoch said the “fastest growing area of overall usage — not just video — is the smartphone.”

In the second quarter of 2016, Nielsen reports that consumers ages 18-34 spent almost as much time each week with their smartphones (14 hours and 36 minutes) and tablets (three hours and 27 minutes) as they did with traditional TV (18 hours and 27 minutes).

Less discussed but equally important are connected TVs. “TVs connected to the Internet by any device have grown from about one-quarter of all households in 2010 to about two-thirds of all households,” Leichtman said. “There are now more connected TV devices in American than there are pay TV set-top boxes.”

Said CBS Interactive president and chief operating officer Marc DeBevoise, “We are seeing explosive usage in those connected TV experiences.” He added that “time spent on connected TVs with our products has grown by more than 300%.”

As an illustration, consumers in October of 2016 spent about 347 minutes per month consuming CBS news content via desktop computers, compared with 360 minutes via Apple TV and 496 minutes via Roku, per unique viewer, DeBevoise noted.

“That is a lot of usage, and we are spending a lot of time making certain we can capitalize on that by getting those experiences right,” he added.

LINES ARE BLURRING

Connected TVs also offer much more advanced capabilities for search and discovery. For example, the Roku platform allows users to search for TV shows and movies across more than 100 apps, Roku general manager of content and services Steve Shannon said.

Advanced features are helping to blur the line between connected devices, pay TV operators and the new bundles of streaming channels.

Companies such as Hulu and Sling are increasingly bundling their subscription packages of channels with a free Roku, Shannon said. Also, Charter, Comcast and a number of other operators have either launched or plan to launch TV everywhere apps on the Roku platform so that subscribers can access a large bouquet of channels on the pay TV apps, he said.

“You have the normalization of OTT, where you are seeing massive amounts of traditional broadcast style content viewing on OTT platforms,” Shannon said.

Free and subscription video-on-demand services sparked a major shift toward over-the-top viewing. Now, the emergence of virtual pay TV providers is stoking another big OTT movement — this time toward linear, live TV services.

This latest trend is shepherded by a new breed of virtual multichannel video programming distributor (MVPD) services such as Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue, and will now expand with last week’s launch of DirecTV Now, as well as online pay TV offerings coming from Hulu and YouTube.

Though use of OTT services is on the rise, even during highly viewed “tentpole” events, it remains relatively small compared to traditional pay TV audiences. Significant scale is coming, though. Meeting the increased demand for live TV feeds via the Internet presents a broad mix of critical technology and business-related challenges that will need to be addressed as Internet- fed audiences continue to expand in the years to come.

STARTED WITH VOD

For OTT video, on-demand was the first entrée, in part because it was easier to engineer. VOD requires materially fewer moving parts and less complicated workflows, John Bishop, chief technology officer of Akamai Technologies’ media business unit, said.

Next came one-off live events, which were more difficult to handle, though Akamai’s platform now handles tens of thousands of them — perhaps 100,000 — per day.

“But what is new right now is linear [networks],” Bishop said. “They are similar to live events from a functionality standpoint, but when you look at it from a redundancy, planning and maintenance perspective, they are very different.”

Some live events, including NBCUniversal’s expansive online coverage of the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janiero earlier this year, are especially intensive. They also provide windows of inactivity that allow for changes and tweaks, though.

“We don’t have that luxury with linear,” Bishop said. “It’s always running.”

While picture quality, consistency and the quality of the experience are all key “tenets” of live streaming, “scale is always the hard one,” he said.

Online video publishers are seeing a greater push into the live arena. “Most every new customer has a requirement for some kind of live [component],” Arik Gaisler, Kaltura senior director of product management, infrastructure, said.

Even partners that don’t have a live stream are looking to add a live-like experience using preprogrammed VOD content that can be spliced into a linear-style stream, Gaisler said.

Progress is being made. It wasn’t long ago that any streaming number with the word “million” tied to it was cause for major concern, Bishop recalled. “We would’ve all gotten the cold shakes — this was an all-hands-on-deck, student-body-left movement,” he said.

These days, preparing for 5 million concurrent streams doesn’t cause a lot of lost sleep.

“North of 10 million gets me very worried,” Bishop said. “And what scares me online is 125 million coming in possibly for an event like the Super Bowl. We’re not there yet.”

Fortunately, neither is the online viewership of pro football’s marquee matchup. Availability of live Super Bowl streams are now the norm, but they tend to be a complementary option to the traditional TV feed.

CBS’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 in February drew 3.96 million unique viewers, far behind the 111.9 million viewers who tuned into the CBS telecast.

SCALING UP

“We still have a long way to get to the point where we can handle broadcast-level scale,” Devin Poolman, senior vice president of digital platforms at Fox Sports, said. “We’re seeing tremendous growth curves … but we need to start building for [broadcast-level scale] now — not just for ourselves, but as an industry.”

During Game 7 of Major League Baseball’s World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians on Nov. 2 — a tight contest that saw the Cubs prevail by a score of 8-7 — more than 1 million consumers viewed some 3.5 million-plus streams via Fox Sports Go, the programmer’s TV everywhere service. Those were OTT records for Fox Sports, yet relatively small figures placed against the 40 million viewers who tuned in via traditional TV for the series clincher.

“Relative to our past records, over the last six months we have quadrupled our bests in terms of concurrent audience,” Poolman said.

Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT TV service, doesn’t break out subscriber numbers, but says its totals have been on the rise since its debut in February 2015.

“We have seen continued growth and we’re pleased with how the year has progressed,” Ben Weinberger, chief product officer at Sling TV, said, noting that live events, led by sports, tend to drive traffic to the OTT TV service.

The recent presidential election, and the debates that surrounded it, also created spikes in usage. And, on occasion, sports and the election collided.

A case in point was on Sept. 26, when the first Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate outstreamed the New Orleans Saints-Atlanta Falcons Monday Night Football game. On Sling TV, the debate at its peak generated 68% more viewers than the football game. Together, the game and the debate helped to shatter all of Sling TV’s previous viewership records.

Jason Thibeault, executive director of the Streaming Video Alliance, a cross-industry group that counts members such as Comcast, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Charter Communications and NeuLion, is also taking on the scalability challenge that live OTT will face as Internet-using audiences continue to grow.

“We don’t have the infrastructure available to deliver live video to 15 million people concurrently. That would break the Internet,” Thibeault said. “There’s a whole value chain when it comes to delivering live video. It has challenges in front of it in order to make it broadcast quality.”

INFRASTRUCTURE WORRIES

Among the solutions getting a close look are multicast streaming, which is more efficient than unicast streaming because it allows a subset of viewers to share live streams; and LTE-B, also referred to as evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS).

SVA, meanwhile, is focusing on the live-streaming challenge in part through a new Open Caching working group that’s focused on putting caches deep into the network, as close to the user as possible. In addition to helping with concurrent streaming, the project will also target latency so that OTT viewers receive a feed more closely synched to the traditional TV broadcast, rather than one that lags 30 seconds behind it.

SVA is creating the functional requirements and technical specifications to build a new open caching infrastructure for companies in the OTT ecosystem. Next year, several SVA member companies are expected to collaborate on a proof-of-concept/demonstration of the open-caching idea.

“Hopefully that will solve some of the latency issues and improve the end-user experience for content delivery for both VOD and for live,” Thibeault said. “All of these players recognize that this is what consumers want and this is the next generation of the television experience.”

Bishop agreed. “Being close to the edge matters more and more now,” he said. “Consumers are expecting lower latency and high data rates. All of that needs to be served as close to the end user as possible.”

Bishop and Akamai are also strong advocates of shifting OTT video to the User Datagram Protocol, an alternative system known for delivering lower latencies and being less “chatty” than Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).

Bishop sees TCP and UDP as coexisting for a long time to come, but expects adoption of UDP to “start small and then quickly ramp up” over the next 36 months.

Much of that work will need to happen on the client side of the streaming equation — laptop browsers, tablets, smartphones and connected-TV platforms. Google Chrome already has native support for UDP, but other devices, such as the iPhone, will need a software development kit to receive UDP content, Bishop explained. Akamai is making an SDK available for free that can pull UDP-based content off its platform, he said.

Dan Rayburn, executive vice president of StreamingMedia. com and a principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, has a different view about the big issues being confronted by live OTT. Some providers are playing it too close to the edge to keep costs in check, he said, which in turn exposes them to unnecessary outages.

Others, like Twitch, the Amazon-owned company behind the popular live-streaming video game service of the same name, rarely run into buffering and capacity issues. Rayburn calls MLB Advanced Media the “gold standard” for live OTT streaming, and a big reason why PlayStation Vue and online video services from the WWE and the National Hockey League use that platform.

“They understand the importance of live. They understand that you get one chance to do it right,” Rayburn said, noting that MLBAM recognizes that underspending on streaming infrastructure and backend workflow systems can harm its reputations and brands.

“Some of the biggest challenges [with live streaming] aren’t technical; they’re business-related,” Rayburn said, pointing out that the vast majority of OTT TV services aren’t adding subscribers rapidly enough to make scale much of an issue — yet.

Some of the newer OTT TV players won’t be able to survive without being subsidized by a well-funded parent, Rayburn added.

Sling TV “wouldn’t be in business if they weren’t owned by Dish,” he said. “They wouldn’t survive [because] their subscriber count is too low.”

And as for DirecTV Now, the new OTT TV service from AT&T? “DirecTV Now couldn’t roll out on its own, because the model doesn’t make sense,” Rayburn said, noting that OTT providers have to pay more in capacity as more and more customers stream content from them.

To its credit, AT&T is nailing up enough capacity to support 1 million simultaneous DirecTV Now users a year from now, he said, citing his sources in the online video industry.

“AT&T is being realistic, internally, in saying, we don’t think we’re going to get that many subs in the first year,” Rayburn said.

AT&T has not made any subscriber predictions for DirecTV Now, other than to say it will be targeted to the 20 million U.S. homes currently outside the traditional pay TV ecosystem.

The company appears confident that it will be able to deliver a high-quality, stable experience for a service that will be streaming more than 100 live TV feeds.

AT&T: WE’RE CONFIDENT

“We do scale at AT&T,” John Stankey, CEO of AT&T Entertainment Group, stressed at the company’s DirecTV Now press event on Nov. 28 in New York. “When you bring a product in, it needs to be scaled.”

Stankey said the new video platform, which DirecTV Now is riding on, will serve as “the foundation for how we’re going to do things in the future.”

Rayburn said it’s important to remember that OTT and broadcast TV are different animals. At a base level, the Internet is open and public, made up of myriad networks and systems. Broadcast television is a closed, standardized and private system that is largely based on fixed costs. “From a cost and infrastructure standpoint, it’s night and day,” he said.

“People always connect capacity with streaming,” Rayburn said, but problems that occur aren’t always with the video itself. Often the problem is an issue with the player, the authentication system or a bad API. “There’s all kinds of steps in the process that have to work perfectly and tie into one another. If any of those don’t work or get hung up, you can’t even get to the video.”

Fox Sports’s Poolman agreed: “Different systems have to work well together. Invariably, there are different failure points or choke points. We spend a lot of our time on how to mitigate that and also have the redundancy and more efficient paths to get to the end user.”

OTT TV providers such as Sling TV need to have a good sense of the average audience to prepare for, but remain agile enough to add streaming and sign-on capacity if, for example, a big breaking news event occurs.

“We have to prepare for normal traffic and we need to prepare for spikes in that traffic because of unexpected events, and we need to prepare for new people coming into the service at the same time,” Weinberger said. “A lot of that has to do with the entire ecosystem that we put in place. There’s only so many things that we can control.”

SIDEBAR: fuboTV Forges a Build-vs.-Buy Path

fuboTV, the self-proclaimed “sports-first” virtual MVPD that launched in January 2015, faced a big challenge in July when FC Barcelona squared off against Real Madrid — a match between popular and rival La Liga soccer clubs that’s known as “El Clasico” whenever it occurs.

fuboTV, which delivered the game via its distribution deal with beIN Sports, ran into some technology snafus: Some subscribers had trouble signing on and others reported different streaming-related issues.

The troubles were temporary, but they happened during a major sporting event and fuboTV made the decision to offer s $15 credit (applied in three monthly $5 increments) to affected subscribers.

It turned into a valuable lesson for the OTT service, which decided it made sense to rebuild its platform in-house rather than relying on one that was largely based on outsourced products.

“When I took this job, I expected very heavily to buy systems from other vendors and put them together,” said Jason Solinsky, a former Google engineer named chief technology officer of fuboTV in August.

“In fact, we’ve gone the opposite direction,” he said, noting that an enormous amount of the software that powers the service’s platform, including its account management and package management systems and code, have been rewritten and developed internally.

“That’s the only way to achieve reliability that’s on par with a cable system,” he said.

fuboTV is about halfway through with replacing its infrastructure, Solinsky said, and expects to complete the job by the end of 2017 if not earlier.

The service now better understands what’s required to develop and scale an OTT TV service and “where the pain parts are,” cofounder and CEO David Gandler said.

Live-streaming, particularly with sports, “requires someone that has access to the full chain of problems that can take place,” he said.

And fuboTV’s internal handiwork is being parlayed into a new, complementary line of business as a streaming platform provider for other services.

“I think we’re a cross-breed between a Sling-type service and BAMTech,” Gandler said, the latter a reference to the tech services and video streaming operation launched by Major League Baseball’s MLB Advanced Media, which recently nabbed a major investment from The Walt Disney Co. “We’ll be focused on building out a fully automated end-to-end solution.”

SIDEBAR: OTT by the Numbers

A recent sampling shows live sports streaming is driving sizable audiences to the OTT world, but those numbers are still dwarfed by traditional TV viewing audiences.

15.2 million: The number of unique viewers who tuned into Yahoo’s global live stream of the National Football League’s Jacksonville Jaguars-Buffalo Bills game on Oct. 25, 2015. Yahoo streamed that game to most regions of the world, but the game was also available on regular TV (via CBS) in the local Buffalo, N.Y., and Jacksonville, Fla., markets. The game generated 33.6 million video streams, and more than 460 million total minutes of video consumed, with 33% of the audience — about 5 million viewers — originating outside the U.S.

3.96 million: The number of unique viewers who accessed CBS’s live stream of Super Bowl 50 between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers across desktops, connected TV platforms, tablets and smartphones. CBS said viewers consumed more than 402 million total minutes of coverage, and watched for more than 101 minutes each on average. By comparison, the CBS Super Bowl telecast averaged 111.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen.

2.1 million: The number of unique viewers worldwide who watched Twitter’s first Thursday Night Football live stream on Sept. 15 between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills. The feed’s average audience was just 243,000, and each viewer watched an average of 22 minutes of the matchup via Twitter. By comparison, 5.4 million television viewers tuned in to watch the game on CBS or NFL Network.

911,000: The number of Sling TV subscribers at the end of third-quarter 2016, according to the latest estimate from MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett. Dish Network no longer breaks out how many of its 13.64 million pay TV subs take the OTT TV offering.

180-plus: The number of live TV feeds offered via Comcast’s TV everywhere app. The MSO said nearly 50% of its subscribers are using its TVE platforms, up from 30% of subscribers last year, and that customers are viewing 10 hours a month of TVE content on average.

SIDEBAR: Struggling to Keep Popular Streams Stable

While OTT TV service stability has been steadily improving, the struggles have tended to pop up during premieres of popular shows or big sporting events.

Among some examples, Sling TV buckled under the strain last August during the AMC premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, and last year during the TBS telecast of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s Final Four round due to a rush of signups and the resulting spike in streaming demand. In June, HBO Now, the premium programmer’s standalone OTT TV service suffered a temporary outage when streamers swamped the system to watch the a new episode from season six of hit series Game of Thrones.

Notably, that hiccup occurred after former HBO chief technology officer, Otto Berkes, resigned in late 2014 after the programmer opted to shift gears and work with a third-party streaming infrastructure partner, MLB Advanced Media, after its TV Everywhere service, HBO Go, melted down multiple times during the premieres of GoT episodes and other series. HBO confirmed last week that it has developed its own technology stack for HBO Go and works with BAMTech for HBO Now.

Last week’s DirecTV Now launch got off to a bit of a rocky start. While the speed and consistency of the service seemed to vary device to device soon after DirecTV Now’s debut, the service’s first evening saw subscribers head to Twitter to lodge complaints about login troubles, browser compatibility problems, long waits for customer service representatives and error codes, including false messages that customers had reached their streaming limit. (DirecTV Now allows up to two concurrent streams per account.)

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, has added another key platform to its streaming mix by launching an app for Apple TV (fourth-generation) devices.

In addition to supporting features such as PS Vue’s cloud DVR and support for simultaneous streaming on up to five devices, the service’s latest implementation will also include integration with the Apple TV Siri  Remote.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Expands Access to CBS Live Local Feeds

Additionally, new subs can sign up for PS Vue’s various service plans and link their subscription to Apple TV without requiring a PlayStation console.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Goes National With ‘Slim’ Packages

PS Vue has been adding platforms as it faces off against traditional MVPDs, as well as virtual ones such as Sling TV and DirecTV Now, which will launch later this month. Hulu plans to launch an OTT-delivered multichannel service in Q1 2017.  YouTube is starting to salt away programming deals for its coming "Unplugged" pay TV service. 

PS Vue is also supported on PCs and Macs, Android TV devices, PS4 and PS3 consoles, Roku devices, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Dropping Viacom Channels

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV  service, said it is dropping all Viacom-owned channels starting Friday, Nov. 11, and is about to add several other services.

All Viacom-owned networks currently offered on PS Vue, including Comedy Central, Spike and MTV, will be dropped starting at 12:01 a.m. ET on Nov.11, Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PS Vue, announced Tuesday in this blog post.

“As part of our ongoing evaluation of the PlayStation Vue offering, we have determined that removing the bundle of channels from Viacom is the best way for us to continue to offer the most compelling value to our fans,” he wrote.

Viacom channels have been part of the PS Vue lineup since the service launched in March 2015.

Update: "We have no pricing changes to announce at this time," a PS Vue spokesperson said via email when asked if pricing on the service would be adjusted following the lineup changes.

DirecTV Now, AT&T’s OTT-TV service that will launch later this month, has a distribution deal with Viacom. Depending on the package, Dish Network-owned OTT-TV service, Sling TV, currently carries Viacom channels such as Comedy Central, Nick Jr., NickToons, TeenNick, MTV, MTV2, TV Land,  and Spike. 

RELATED: Viacom, Dish Reach Carriage Agreement

Viacom said it declined to comment at this time. 

PS Vue has not released subscriber figures, but a Bloomberg report in June put it at 100,000-plus, noting that the service got a lift from the introduction of new “Slim” packages that give PS Vue a national reach for its multichannel subscription service.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Goes National With ‘Slim’ Packages

Benefield said PS Vue will be adding some new channels starting Wednesday (November 9), including BBC America and NBA TV, with plans to launch Viceland and more local broadcast stations from CBS and Fox “soon.” PS Vue recently added HBO and Cinemax.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Expands Access to CBS Live Local Feeds

About 50 PS Vue customers responded to the decision on the blog at last check Tuesday afternoon. Several said they intend to drop the service, or wanted a more detailed reason behind the decision.

“Whelp, guess I should start looking for a new streaming service, and I’ve only been on Vue for a few months,” a user going by “NintendoTom” wrote.

“Very disappointing to lose these (particularly, as a parent, the Nickelodeon/Nick Jr. channels). More transparency on how/why this happened would be appreciated, as well as whether negotiations to restore these are in process,” posted “judasgoat.”

Some weren’t too upset.  “Always a bummer to lose value (i.e. channels per dollar) but I never watched those networks, so I am ok with it. Even with this, Vue is a good deal compared to my other options, just hope the trend does not continue,” wrote a user who goes by “CycoCross.”

PS Vue is available on PCs and Macs, Android TV devices, PS4 and PS3 consoles, Roku devices, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, followed up on its pledge to add Web support for PCs and Macs.

Sony, which last week announced plans to hit that platform “soon,” said support for PCs and Macs was launched Thursday. The service’s Web implementation includes unique features such as a “mini-player” that enables viewers to shrink the live TV window to the corner of the browser window and continue browsing the PS Vue service.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Streams to Android TVs

PS Vue recently added support for Android TV devices (OS 4.4 or higher, including integrated Android TVs and streaming devices such as the Nvidia Shield). PS Vue is also compatible with PS4 and PS3 consoles, Roku devices, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

Speaking at the recent Next TV Summit in New York, Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PS Vue, said the OTT-TV service is expanding its reach, attracting consumers beyond millennials and gamers, following the introduction of a national multichannel offering and expansion on a broader range of devices.

PS Vue is expanding that reach as competition in the OTT-TV sector continues to heat up. In addition to traditional MVPDs and Sling TV, which is focused on a more slimmed down lineup, PS Vue will also be contending with DirecTV Now, which is expected to launch later this month with a base package that runs $35 per month. Hulu, meanwhile, is working toward an early 2017 launch of its own multichannel TV service.  

RELATED: Fox, Disney Reach Hulu Carriage Deals

YouTube reportedly is working on a virtual MVPD service under the “Unplugged” banner, with CBS among the programmers that have already inked distribution deals for it.  

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, is broadening its reach by extending support to Android TVs (Android OS 4.4 or higher), with plans to add support for PC and Mac Web browsers “soon.”

PS Vue on Web browsers will include some unique features, including a “mini-player” that lets viewers shrink the player to the corner of the browser window and continue browsing the PS Vue service, Dan Myers, head of product at PS Vue, explained in this blog post.

Notably, consumers can sign up for PlayStation Vue via the web for both devices without the need of a PlayStation console, Sony said.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Goes National With ‘Slim’ Packages

The addition of Android TVs (Sharp and Sony make them) and coming support for PC and Mac browsers, PS Vue is also compatible with PS4 and PS3 consoles, Roku devices, iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

Update: Sony confirmed that PS Vue will work with all Android TV devices equipped with Android OS 4.4 and up, including devices such as the Nvidia Shield. 

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Launches Android Mobile App

Speaking at the recent Next TV Summit in New York, Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PS Vue, said the OTT-TV service is attracting millennials as well as families with children as it introduced a nationwide multichannel offering and as the service expands support to a broader range of streaming platforms and devices.

NESN, the regional sports network and TV home of the Boston Bruins and Boston Red  Sox, said it launched on PlayStation Vue to coincide with the start of the 2016/2017 NHL season.

NESN is now offered on "several” PlayStation Vue plans to fans in the network’s broadcast territory, which includes Massachusetts, Connecticut (except for Fairfield County), Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.

Speaking at last week’s Next TV Summit in New York, Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PS Vue, said the OTT-TV service is attracting millennials as well as families with children as it introduced a nationwide multichannel offering and as the service expands support to a broader range of streaming platforms and devices.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Goes National With ‘Slim’ Packages

“The new platforms definitely helped,” Benefield said.  “Having [streaming] sticks from Amazon and Roku that are sub-$50 has helped with the ease of access to the service, PlayStation Vue is for the gamer household, including the children, wives and partners of the user.”

Get complete coverage of the Next TV Summit.

NEW YORK – More than year after its initial launch in March, 2015 Sony PlayStation Vue chief Dwayne Benefield said the service is attracting a broad swath of customers, including families with children, a long way from the core gamer demographic the service initially targeted.

At the Next TV Summit here Wednesday (Oct. 19) during NYC Television & Video Week, Benefield, vice president and head of PlayStation Vue at Sony Interactive Entertainment, said that while two-thirds of its audience remains millennial, about one-quarter of subscribers are new to the PlayStation medium. That has been fueled by expanding the platforms that can run on the service.

“The new platforms definitely helped,” Benefield said in a fireside chat with Next TV editor and Multichannel News technology editor Jeff Baumgartner. “Having sticks from Amazon and Roku that are sub-$50 has helped with the ease of access to the service, PlayStation Vue is for the gamer household, including the children, wives and partners of the user.”

Benefield said that the typical PlayStation Vue customer is a heavy sports fan – its basic package includes all the Fox and Comcast regional sports networks – adult cartoons and some kids programming are also joining the most-watched ranks in the service.

“Mickey Mouse Clubhouse is one of our top shows,” Benefield said. “Kids’ channels are performing much better.  Families are engaging.”

PlayStation Vue has worked hard to include broadcast content in the service – it has reached deals to carry all four major broadcasters in their respective owned and operated [O&O] markets. While expanding out of that footprint has been more difficult, mainly because local affiliates are owned by several different groups, Benefield said the idea is to make local TV available across the footprint.

In markets where it currently doesn’t offer live local broadcasters, it offers “slim” versions of its three core packages – Access, Core and Elite – that allow users to watch network content on demand the day after original air. An Ultra TV package that includes premium channels HBO and Showtime and more than 100 other channels was added last month.

“The goal is to make all broadcast stations available,” Benefield said. “You will see us bring more and more live and local to users.”

Sony doesn’t release subscriber figures for PlayStation Vue, but Benefield said the service is exceeding all company expectations.  

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, said it has added five more CBS local live feeds as it continues to expand its broadcast TV mix.

The latest group, which includes stations owned by Meredith Corp., factors in CBS affiliates in Atlanta; Hartford and New Haven; Kansas City; Phoenix (Prescott); and St. Louis.

PS Vue also offers the live local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in their respective owned-and-operated markets, and recently added CBS feeds in certain Sinclair, Raycom and Midwest Television markets.

RELATED: PlayStation Vue Offers Big 4 Broadcast TV Feeds in All O&O Markets

In markets where it doesn’t offer certain live local broadcast TV feeds, PS Vue’s new national “Slim” packages, launched in mid-March, provide next-day, on-demand access to shows from those broadcasters.

Also this week, PS Vue launched access to HBO and Cinemax, as well as a new Ultra multichannel pay TV package that includes HBO and Showtime.

PS Vue is currently supported on PlayStation 3 and PS4 consoles, Roku players and Roku TVs, the Google Chromecast adapter, iOS and Android mobile devices, and Amazon Fire TV devices.

Per the service’s FAQ, a single PlayStation Vue account can simultaneously stream the service on up to one PS4 console and one PS3 console in the same home, via the mobile app on up to three iOS and Android devices, as well as on the Fire TV, Roku streaming devices, and Chromecast. Depending on the device configuration in the home, a PS Vue sub can access up to five streams at once.

HBO and Cinemax have launched on PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, with HBO Now, the premium programmer’s separate direct-to-consumer over-the-top offering, debuting on the PlayStation 4 and PS3 consoles.

The launch comes about two weeks after they announced that the debut would come ahead of the October 2 premiere of HBO's much-anticipated sci-fi drama, Westworld.

HBO and Cinemax are also available through PlayStation Vue as standalone channel offerings for $15 each per month. HBO Now, HBO’s standalone OTT subscription service, has also launched on PlayStation 4 and PS3 consoles. 

PS Vue is also debuting Ultra, a package that includes HBO, Showtime and north of 100 sports, movie and TV channels for $64.99 per month (or $74.99 in areas where PS Vue provides access to major live local TV broadcasts).  Ultra complements PS Vue’s existing Elite, Core, and Access packages.

PS Vue is also supported on Roku players and Roku TVs, iOS and Android mobile devices, and Amazon Fire TV devices.

It’s a PlayStation kind of day for HBO.

The premium programmer announced Thursday that it has secured a deal to offer HBO and Cinemax via PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, and will also launch HBO Now, its direct-to-consumer offering on PlayStation 3 and PS4 consoles.

Consumers who subscribe to HBO through PlayStation Vue will also be able to access HBO Now on all supporting devices at no extra charge, they said.

The premium programmer said the distribution on PS Vue is the first time that either network’s live feeds will be offered directly to consumers as a standalone offering without the need for a separate pay TV subscription.

PS Vue will sell HBO and Cinemax for $15 each.

HBO noted that the launches will come ahead of the October 2 premiere of Westworld, a reimagined version of the Michael Crichton story about a Wild West-styled theme park for adults that's inhabited androids.

“PlayStation has always been at the forefront of innovation and we are thrilled to build upon our partnership with them to meet the evolving demands of television audiences,” said Jeff Dallesandro, SVP, worldwide digital distribution and business development at HBO, in a statement. “By expanding the ways that PlayStation users can access unparalleled programming like Game of Thrones, The Night Of and Last Week Tonight, we’re demonstrating our commitment to flexibility and quality.”

“HBO’s award-winning content is a great match for the PlayStation audience, and the addition of HBO and Cinemax builds upon our commitment to bring the best of live and on demand TV to our users.” Added Dwayne Benefield, VP and head of PlayStation Vue. “PlayStation Vue continues to bring industry firsts to users who want a better way to watch TV, including being the first to offer HBO and Cinemax as live standalone channels. Our flexible subscription options offer more choices for consumers than ever before.”

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, is gearing up for the new football season by launching NFL Network and offering NFL RedZone as an add-on subscription.

PS Vue said NFL Network is offered on its national Core and Elite tiers. Subs on those packages can also sign up for NFL RedZone for an additional $39.99 for the full regular season, Dwayne Benefield, head of PlayStation Vue, announced on this blog post.

He noted that subscribers on Core or  Elite “soon” will also have access to Watch NFL Network via NFL.com, the NFL app, and via NFL Mobile for no additional cost.

PS Vue Core starts at $34.99 per month ($44.99 per month in cities that PS Vue offers live local broadcast stations); while Elite starts at $44.99 per month, or $54.99 month in the markets that the service supports live local TV.  

PS Vue offers the local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in their respective owned-and-operated markets, as well as CBS local feeds in select Sinclair, Raycom and Midwest Television markets.

In markets where PS Vue doesn’t offer certain live local broadcast TV feeds, it offers next-day, on-demand access to shows from those broadcasters.

PS Vue is currently offered on the PS4 and PS3 consoles,  Amazon Fire TV devices, Roku devices, and apps for iOS and Android mobile devices. The service is also optimized for the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

PlayStation Vue has bulked up its sports offerings with a new carriage agreement for the NFL Network and NFL RedZone, the company said Monday.

The Sony Interactive Entertainment-owned streaming service will debut both the NFL Network, which will offer live Thursday Night Football games, as well as the NFL RedZone channel -- which offers look-ins to ongoing games when scoring plays are imminent -- in time for the kickoff of the NFL’s 2016 regular season schedule in September, said company officials.

PlayStation Vue subscribers receiving NFL Network and NFL RedZone will also have access to the services through Watch NFL Network, available on NFL.com, the NFL app across connected TV devices, and via NFL Mobile on Windows, iOS and Android devices, said PlayStation.

“Sports is among the most-watched content on PlayStation Vue, and we’re pleased to add two highly coveted sports networks, NFL Network and NFL RedZone, to the service for football fans to enjoy nationwide,” said Dwayne Benefield, vice president, head of PlayStation Vue. “We’re proud to be able to deliver a unique TV viewing experience through PlayStation Vue with our groundbreaking interface and cloud-based technology, and our agreement with NFL Media allows fans to experience the upcoming football season like never before.” 

In a clear sign that its talks with broadcast TV station groups outside the O&Os are progressing, Sony PlayStation Vue confirmed that it has extended access to live local CBS feeds in nine more markets.

Per a PS Vue official, the following markets and stations are now part of the virtual MVPD’s live  TV lineup:

-Austin: KEYE (Sinclair)

-Charlotte: WBTV (Raycom Media)

-Cincinnati: WKRC (Sinclair)

-Cleveland: CBS9 (Raycom)

-Grand Rapids: Newschannel3 (Sinclair)

-Harrisburg: CBS21 (Sinclair)

-Salt Lake City: KUTV2 (Sinclair)

-San Diego: CBS8 (Midwest Television)

-West Palm Beach: CBS12 (Sinclair)

Cord Cutters News reported Wednesday that PS Vue had recently added CBS live streams in some new markets.

The extensions of CBS live local feeds in select Raycom, Sinclair and Midwest Television markets comes about two months after PlayStation Vue confirmed that it was offering the live local feeds of the Big 4 (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) in all of their respective owned and operated markets.

“We continue to have discussions with local broadcast station owners and will be working to add more local stations to TV markets across the country,” a Sony spokesperson said via email.

Sling TV, a virtual MVPD owned by Dish Network that offers a mix of skinny bundles, has also been making progress in its ability to offer live local broadcast TV channels on its OTT-TV platform.

In markets where it doesn’t offer certain live local broadcast TV feeds, PS Vue’s new national “Slim” packages, launched in mid-March, provide next-day, on-demand access to shows from those broadcasters.

PS Vue also introduced a new app for the Amazon Fire TV Tuesday that features a faster navigation menu along with an update specifically for second-generation Fire TV boxes that support 60 frames per second and deliver a richer HD picture.

PS Vue is also offered on PlayStation 3 and PS4 consoles, Roku players and Roku TVs, the Fire TV Stick, via apps for Android and iOS mobile devices, and is optimized for the Google Chromecast streaming adapter.

Sony has not released sub figures for PS Vue, which debuted on March 18, 2015,  but Bloomberg reportedrecentlythat the servicehad eclipsed 100,000 subs,

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, has followed through with plans to launch an app for Android smartphones and tablets.

Sony, which announced earlier this month that an Android-powered mobile offering was in development and nearing launch, booted up the app Wednesday (June 29) on Google Play. It requires Android 4.4 or higher. 

The addition expands PS Vue’s array of supported devices. PS Vue also offers a mobile app for iOS devices, and has extended its service on Roku players and Roku TVs, PlayStation 3 and PS4 consoles, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, and is optimized for the Google Chromecast.

Sony has not announced PS Vue subscriber figures, but Bloomberg reported yesterday that the service now has more than 100,000 of them, with a rise in the rate driven in part by Sony's recent launch of a set of “Slim” pay TV packages that give PlayStation Vue a national reach.

PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service that debuted in March 2015 in a set of markets, has more than 100,000 subs, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter, including one that put the total at about 120,000.

Sony, the report said, has seen the rate of subscriptions rise since it launched a trio of “Slim” pay TV packages that are available on a national basis rather than limited to a small batch of markets.  Last month, Sony confirmed last month that PlayStation Vue now offers the local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in all of their respective owned-and-operated markets.

PS Vue recently teamed on asubscription drive promo with ESPN that’s running during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament.

While 100,000-plus subscribers doesn’t yet make PlayStation Vue a major pay TV provider, it does inch it closer to another virtual MVPD, Sling TV, which had more than 600,000 subs, per a report from The Wall Street  Journal in February. Bloomberg said that number has since surpassed 700,000.

In addition to the launch of national multichannel packages alongside some a la carte options, PS Vue has been expanding its device reach. It launched an app for Roku players and Roku TVs earlier this month, adding to existing support on PlayStation 3 and PS4 consoles, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, iOS devices (the PS Vue mobile app), and the Google Chromecast (initially via  iOS devices). Sony is close to launching a PS Vue app for Android smartphones and tablets.

PS Vue, which offers a cloud DVR, markets three packages: Access ($29.99 per month, or $39.99 in cities with major live local broadcast stations); Core ($34.99//$44.99); and Elite ($44.99/$54.99). It also offers standalone/a la carte services such as Showtime, Machinima, Fox Soccer Plus, and “Premium Pack” bundle (Showtime and Epix Hits).

Even with its device diversity and national pay TV packages, some analysts remain unconvinced that PS Vue can rise to the level of becoming a major OTT platform in part because its offerings are not materially cheaper than services from traditional MVPDs.

Several others are developing or rumored to be developing virtual MVPD offerings, including Apple, Samsung, YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu, which plans to launch an OTT-TV service next year.

Adding a key streaming platform to its repertoire, PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, has launched an app for Roku players and integrated Roku TVs.

Sony also said it will add support for  Android smartphones and tablets sometime next week.

The addition of Roku and coming expansion on Android broadens the streaming platform universe for PS Vue, which also supports PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles, Amazon Fire TV boxes and the Fire TV Stick, iOS devices (via the PS Vue mobile app), along with optimization for the Google Chromecast (initially via iOS devices).

Roku recently crossed 10 million active monthly users, also supports an authenticated app for Charter Communications and has a deal in place to create an app that will support Comcast’s full suite of pay TV services, including the X1 cloud DVR.

“What we want to do is to be like Switzerland in this mix and offer as much choice as possible and have the best content offering, and then give tools so you can watch what you want on the terms that you want to pay for," Matthew Anderson,  Roku’s chief marketing officer, said last week during a keynote chat here at the NextTV Summit & Expo  in San Francisco.

PS Vue, which has teamed on a subscription drive promo with ESPN during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, launched a trio of “Slim” pay TV packages that are available on a national basis in March. Last month, Sony confirmed last month that PlayStation Vue also offers the local feeds of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in all of their respective owned-and-operated markets.

PS Vue, which offers a cloud DVR, markets three packages – Access ($29.99 per month, or $39.99 in cities with major live local broadcast stations); Core ($34.99//$44.99); and Elite ($44.99/$54.99). It also offers standalone/a la carte services such as Showtime, Machinima, Fox Soccer Plus, and “Premium Pack” bundle (Showtime and Epix Hits).

ESPN and PlayStation Vue are hooking up on a campaign around the UEFA European Football Championship that aims to drive up subs for Sony’s OTT-TV service.

Starting June 20, PlayStation Vue will run messaging encourage soccer fans to sign up for a free seven-day trial of the service to watch the tourney, which runs through July 10. The messaging will appear on the PlayStation Vue Hub Feature Tile and via system messages to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles. ESPN, meanwhile, will run the ads on ESPN.com, ESPNFC.com and espnW.com

Under the marketing partnership, they plan to target consumers who are fans of ESPN but don’t currently have a multichannel pay TV subscription. They said Euro 2016 offers a unique opportunity for the promo due to the non-traditional viewing windows  (games for the tourney generally are played outside of U.S. prime time hours). ESPN said its data from the 2014 World Cup also shows that soccer fans gravitated to its WatchESPN offering – in addition to ABC’s telecast, the final match on WatchESPN, for example, generated 1.8 million live unique viewers, 112.1 million live minutes viewed, and was the highest time spent per viewer (63 minutes) of any match of the 2014 World Cup.

The subscription acquisition promo around the tourney follows the launch of ESPN on PlayStation Vue in March as part of a larger carriage deal with ABC and Disney.  Also in March, PS Vue launched a set of “Slim” pay TV packages that are available on a national basis.

Hulu is looking to expand beyond SVOD with an over-the-top, virtual MVPD offering that would bundle feeds from popular broadcast TV and cable channels, The Wall Street Journalreported Sunday.

Hulu is eyeing a Q1 2017 launch, with co-owners The Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox closing in on distribution deals for Hulu’s developing service, according to the report. ABC, ESPN,  Disney Channel, Fox’s broadcast network, Fox News, FX and its Fox’s national and regional sports channels are among the offerings that could be part of a package, the WSJ said, noting that Comcast-owned NBCUniversal has not yet agreed to license programming for the planned OTT-TV service.  Hulu is owned by 21st Century Fox, Disney and NBCU.

Update: NBCU is actively negotiating with Hulu as part of the new product the OTT provider is developing, a person familiar with the negotiations said, noting that Hulu has only recently approached NBCU about the service that it has in mind. 

Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger speculated last month that Hulu could be working on a skinny TV offering that could be delivered over-the-top and fetch about $40 per month. “The appeal of Skinny Hulu, we suppose, would be: if skinny bundles are gaining popularity, the major network owners should take their product directly to consumers, capture the opportunity (and the margin, and the asset value) themselves, and ensure their networks are part of the theoretically) most widely distributed skinny bundle offering. Leave the nonsense networks out," Juenger wrote in a note issued on April 22. 

If Hulu’s purported plan is successful, it would join a growing mix of virtual MVPD providers that include Sony PlayStation Vue, Dish Network’s Sling TV, as well as offerings such as fuboTV, a “sports-first” service that has more than 50,000 subscribers.  AT&T, meanwhile, is working on a set of DirecTV-branded OTT services, including DirecTV Now, a service that will be a close cousin to the packages offered via the traditional satellite TV service. Amazon and Apple are among others that reportedly have been eyeing OTT-TV services.

Word of Hulu’s interest in expanding beyond an SVOD service that competes with Netflix and Amazon Prime and a new stand-alone Amazon subscription streaming service would also rise amid an expanding number of standalone OTT offerings from CBS, HBO, Showtime and, most recently, Starz.

Though Comcast has corporate ties to Hulu, a pay TV bundle from the online video specialist could apply pressure on cable operators and telco TV providers to assemble services that can be delivered outside their traditional footprints.  

Speaking on last week’s earnings call, Comcast Cable president and CEO Neil Smit said there’s no reason why Comcast couldn’t offer an out-of-footprint OTT service, once it had the distribution rights to do so, but said the economics don’t add up.  “We, thus far, haven't seen an OTT model that really hunts,” Smit said.  “But we'll continue to stay tuned into the market and be prepared to respond accordingly." 

Hulu was not immediately available for comment Sunday, but WSJ speculates that the service Hulu has in mind could run about $40 per month and possibly include a cloud DVR.

A multichannel service from Hulu would seemingly compete with other pay TV offerings. Hulu, however, has been cozying up with MVPDs with its SVOD service. Last month, Cablevision Systems was the first MVPD to distribute Hulu to pay TV customers. AT&T, Armstrong, Atlantic Broadband, Mediacom Communications, Midcontinent Communications and WideOpenWest (WOW!) also have deals in place to distribute Hulu.

More than five months after announcing a distribution deal with Disney and ESPN, Sony PlayStation Vue has moved ahead with the launch of the Longhorn Network for subscribers in Texas and Oklahoma.

For qualified subs, the University of Texas sports net is offered on PS Vue’s “Core” multi-channel plan starting at $34.99 per month.

ESPN said the following channels will be added “soon” to PS Vue’s lineup: ESPN3, ESPN Goal Line, ESPN Buzzer Beater, ESPN Bases Loaded, ESPN Deportes and ESPN Classic.

The launch of the Longhorn Network also comes on the heels of PS Vue’s debut of “slim” multichannel TV packages that are offered nationwide and feature dozens of live cable channels and next-day access to shows from most broadcast TV networks. PS Vue’s multichannel service packages that include live broadcast TV are still limited to seven markets – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas and Miami.

“ESPN is committed to Longhorn Network and serving Texas sports fans wherever they consume content,” Stacie McCollum, ESPN’s senior director, Longhorn Network Programming & Acquisitions, said in a statement. “The network’s launch on PlayStation Vue further expands LHN’s availability to fans within Texas and Oklahoma. It is a prime example of consistent distribution growth year over year for the network since launching in 2011.”

“The University of Texas is delighted that the Longhorn Network is making this launch,” added Mike Perrin, University of Texas Men’s Athletic Director. “We have a great relationship with the network, and additional distribution of content remains a hallmark of success.”

PlayStation Vue currently supports the PlayStation 4 and PS3 consoles, Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick,  its app for the iPad and iPhone, and via the Google Chromecast streaming adapter (through compatible iOS devices).

Sony PlayStation Vue is looking to change the pay TV game with this week's launch of new set of “Slim” packages that are available on a national basis.

Unlike PS Vue’s multichannel service packages offered in the offering’s initial seven markets (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas and Miami), Sony’s new Slim packs don’t offer access to live local broadcast TV signals. However, Sony is trying to get around that by offering next-day VOD access to shows from NBC, Fox and ABC (with content from CBS becoming available at a later date) as it looks to hammer out deals with station groups that could eventually broaden its ability to deliver local signals.

Still, PS Vue’s programming gaps (A+E Networks aren’t yet part of the mix, either) and current device limitations (it's currently supported on the PS3, PS4, Amazon Fire TV platform, an app for iPads and iPhones, and optimized for the Google Chromecast adapter, with support for additional platforms in the works) leave one analyst wondering if the OTT service will be successful in breaking out and becoming a major factor in the shifting pay TV landscape.

“To us, the biggest questions on Sony’s product remain price and the broadcast network stream outside of the initial seven market rollout,” MoffettNathanson said Monday in a blog post. “In the 203 other markets, the $30 price point looks enticing, but it does not include live broadcast network content such as news and sports or CBS on-demand content at this point in time.  At the $40 dollar offering, the offering is robust, but not materially cheaper than a traditional TV package. Additionally, in order to use Sony Vue customers need to have a Playstation 3 or 4 or Amazon Fire TV device as well as a standalone broadband subscription.  Putting this all together, we remain skeptical that Sony’s Vue will develop into a major OTT platform.”

Live locals outside the broadcasters’ O&O markets “remain the biggest holdup for a true nationwide OTT offering,” the MoffettNathanson added, noting that the pricing on the new Slim packages (Access Slim/ $29.99 per month; Core Slim/$34.99 per month; and Elite Slim/$44.99 per month) “effectively prices the live-streaming portion of the broadcast networks in the $2.50 per channel range.”

In its analysis of Sony Vue’s base package, which consists of 54 cable networks, and marrying them up to Nielsen reach data, MoffettNathanson calculates that almost 80% of the OTT-TV’s channels are in the top 50.

But the firm also point out that unlike Sling TV, a skinny-bundle OTT-TV service that starts at $20 per month, Sony’s PS Vue has some differentiators and feature advantages such, including a cloud DVR and rights for up to five simultaneous streams. Sling TV’s service allows multiple streams for some, but not all, channels in its live TV lineup.

So, it appears that PS Vue’s latest national move represents a nice step forward, but that it still has a ways to go before completing its journey to become a true threat to cable operators and other traditional MVPDs. 

Rumors about Apple’s flirtation with an OTT-TV offering has been well documented…for years. One can count on a new rumor that pushes the ball forward a yard or two to emerge about once a quarter.

The latest round of scuttlebutt claims that Apple’s plans to offer a national service, with access to the major broadcast TV networks, continued to be bogged down in discussions with the networks and programmers.

While the rumors about what Apple intends to do persist, it’s quite clear that the company does want to get into the pay TV business in a much bigger way. The latest evidence comes way of ESPN president John Skipper’s recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“We’ve had discussions with Apple,” Skipper (pictured) told the publication when asked about the emergence of streaming services from Sony (PlayStation Vue) and Sling TV. “I believe in 2016 there will be further announcements on other kinds of packages….that will get younger subscribers into the market.”

Skipper heaped some praise on the new apps-friendly Apple TV platform, which already supports the authenticated WatchESPN app. But Skipper also hinted at the potential to use Apple’s platform for more.

“We are big proponents of believing it would be a fabulous place to sell some subscriptions. We have ongoing conversations. They have been frustrated by their ability to construct something which works for them with programmers. We continue to try to work with them,” he said.

Even as ESPN struggles with subscriber declines, it is already getting a taste of how new OTT distribution models might lend a hand.

PlayStation Vue notched an important distribution deal with Disney and ESPN in November 2015, and ESPN has been a key part of Sling TV’s core package ever since its launch about a year ago.

“We see Sling TV numbers, which are significant,” Skipper said. He also would not contradict the understanding that ESPN can back out if Sling TV is cannibalizing the Worldwide Leader's core business, but was satisfied so far that the consumers that Sling TV is bringing to the table are additive.

Skipper also acknowledged that ESPN’s subscriber issues are tied to consumers “trading down to lighter cable packages,” but stopped short of saying ESPN plans to offer a full, direct-to-consumer basis and follow in the footsteps of CBS, HBO and Showtime, but does like the idea of offering smaller packages direct, such as ESPN’s test run with the Cricket World Cup.

“We are still engaged in the most successful business model in the history of media, and see no reason to abandon it,” he said. 

Taking a page from the Sling TV playbook, Sony has been offering a free Amazon Fire TV Stick to subs who sign up for one of two PlayStation Vue multichannel packages – “Core” and “Elite.”

PS Vue extended access to the  Fire TV box and Fire TV Stick last month, and began to pitch the Fire TV Stick bundle on November 15, according to the service’s web site.

Per the fine print, new Core and Elite subs are in line for one Fire TV Stick per PS Vue account so long as they convert their free trials to paid subscriptions. Eligible subs receive a code that can be redeemed at Amazon.com for the streaming device through Jan. 15, 2016. Of course, they’ll also need have an account with Amazon.

Sony, which has not released PS Vue subscriber figures, also recently cut the price of its Core and Elite packages by $5 per month. Core currently sells for $54.99 per month, while Elite fetches $64.99 per month. PS Vue’s entry-level Access tier (steady at $49.99 per month) is not part of the Fire TV Stick promo.

But the Fire TV Stick tie-in is another example of how a new class of virtual MVPDs are bundling their services with streaming devices.

Sling TV, Dish Network’s OTT-TV service, is currently offering $50 off an Amazon Fire TV box or a Roku 3 player or a free Roku Streaming Stick to new subs who prepay for three months of service, which starts at $20 per month.

Sony PlayStation Vue has added another streaming platform to its lineup as it followed through with anticipated support for Google’s Chromecast streaming adapter.

Sony said PlayStation Vue, its over-the-top multichannel pay TV service, is initially offering support for Chromecast via compatible iOS devices.

Sony announced planned support for the Chromecast in November as it extended support for PS Vue on the Amazon Fire TV box and Fire TV Stick. PS Vue is also offered on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles and via an app for iPads and iPhones.

Sony, which recently struck an important carriage deal with Disney-ESPN, has not released subscriber figures, but said that PS Vue’s daily average viewership currently exceeds five hours.

A Sony official also noted that 75% of PS Vue subs are 18-34 years old, and that the average time spent “per play” (selection of content) on PS Vue is now 45 minutes, a figure that plays on the platform’s personalization and discovery features.

Sony PS Vue currently offers multichannel pay TV packages (with a cloud DVR)  in Dallas-Fort Worth; Miami-Fort Lauderdale; Chicago; Philadelphia; Los Angeles;  New York City; and San Francisco.

PS Vue’s three multichannel packages are: Access ($49.99 per month); Core ($54.99 per month), and Elite ($64.99). Sony has recently reduced the price on its Core and Elite packages by $5 per month, according to the service’s Web site.

PS Vue also offers select a la carte programming on a national basis, including Showtime’s OTT service, Fox Soccer Plus, and a new premium TV channel from Machinima. Epix Hits, a new channel that is paired with a VOD library, is also available on PS Vue as a premium pack with Showtime for $13.99 per month (or $11.49 for PlayStation Plus members), and in the PS Vue Elite tier, or as an add-on to the service's Access and Core packages.

PlayStation Vue, Sony's subscription over-the-top video service for its gaming platform, is set to begin streaming on Amazon's Fire TV box and Fire TV Stick, with support for the Google Chromecast coming soon, the company said Wednesday (Nov. 12).

The deal with Amazon marks the first time the cloud-based service has been available on connected-TV devices other than Sony's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles. Sony had previously released a mobile iOS app-based version of the service for the iPhone and iPad. 

Expanding the service to the Fire platform opens it up to an even broader consumer audience, Sony said. Using Amazon's streaming devices enables PlayStation owners with an existing Vue subscription to access the service on additional TVs in the household without purchasing additional gaming consoles. 

The expansion closely follows a carriage deal Sony struck with Disney earlier this month that brings the full complement of Disney and ESPN Media networks to the service, including ESPN, Disney Channel and ABC Family, as well as ABC-owned local stations, filling what had been a sizeable gap in the Vue lineup

Both Vue's lineup of standalone channels available nationwide, such as Showtime, Epix Hits and Fox Soccer Plus, and its multichannel packages available in select markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco and Miami, will be available on the Fire devices.

In a limited-time holiday promotion starting on Nov. 15, new Vue customers in those markets who sign up for a free trial of PlayStation Vue's "Core" or "Elite" programming tiers will receive a free Amazon Fire TV Stick with their first month's paid subscription; Core is a package of sports channels, and Elite is an entertainment package.

Sony also has reduced the prices of those two tiers, another marketing move timed to the holidays; the new rates are available now to new subscribers, while current subscribers will receive the new pricing in their next billing cycle, the company said. The basic "Access" package of some 50 broadcast TV, movie and sports channels remains unchanged.

Later this year Sony will extend the service to the Google Chromecast via its PlayStation Vue Mobile app for iOS devices, which will bring the number of devices that can stream the service to seven (PS4, PS3, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, iPhone, iPad and Chromecast).

"Adding PlayStation Vue to these popular streaming devices is a great way to extend our pioneering cloud-based TV service to other TVs in the household and to reach new consumers who don't own PlayStation consoles," said Dan Myers, head of product for PlayStation Vue. "With the holiday season around the corner, now is the ideal time for us to expand PlayStation Vue access."

Filling a big gap in its programming lineup, PlayStation Vue, Sony’s OTT-TV service, has inked a carriage deal that will provide it with access to the complete Disney and ESPN network lineup, including ESPN, ABC-owned local stations, Disney Channel and ABC Family.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but they said the carriage agreement  includes “unique features,” including the ability for PS Vue subs to play multiple streams from one account, and the ability to stream content across multiple devices both in and out of the subscriber’s home.

Additionally, local ABC affiliate stations will have the opportunity to opt-in to the PS Vue service with their live linear programming, they said.

Sony said more details, including launch timing, will be announced at a later date, but here are the Disney and ESPN Media Networks that will be on offer via PS Vue: ABC-owned stations group, ABC Family (becoming Freeform in January); Disney Channel; Disney Junior; Disney XD; ESPN; ESPN2; ESPN College Extra; ESPNU; ESPNEWS; ESPN Deportes; ESPN Classic; ESPN Goal Line; ESPN Buzzer Beater; ESPN Bases Loaded; Fusion; Longhorn Network; and SEC-ESPN Network.

Tied in, PlayStation Vue will also offer a library of on-demand content from Disney and ESPN, including the ability to catch-up on shows within three days of airing without the need to record or “tag” the show (PS Vue does support a cloud DVR that allows users to save recorded shows for up to 28 days).

Sony currently makes PS Vue available on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles, and recently launched a PS Vue app for the iPad. Gaming consoles remained the top CE device used to access online video content as of the first quarter of 2015, per a new study from Parks Associates.

While Sony has not announced how it will package its new Disney and ESPN programming, it currently markets three multichannel plans: Access ($49.99 per month), Core ($59.99 per month), and Elite ($69.99 per month). In its multichannel markets, PS Vue has been lacking access to ABC's broadcast network while providing access to the broadcast feeds of CBS, Fox, and NBC.

“This deal demonstrates our continued commitment to offer the best content on TV to PlayStation Vue users,” said Dwayne Benefield, vice president and head of PlayStation Vue, in a statement. “The addition of Disney and ESPN’s primetime programming and live marquee sports to our portfolio ensures subscribers will have access to the most popular network programming on television today. We’re also proud to be the first Internet-based pay TV service to offer Disney’s networks with the streaming features that set PlayStation Vue apart from the industry, making TV viewing a more enjoyable experience for the whole household.”

“PlayStation Vue provides a unique way to engage with our content and an opportunity to reach a segment of viewers who want a different kind of television experience,” added Justin Connolly, EVP of affiliate sales and marketing, Disney and ESPN Media Networks. “The addition of our content to the PlayStation Vue platform will make the offering more compelling as consumers navigate their video options.”

PS Vue also offers select a la carte programming on a national basis, including Showtime’s OTT service, Fox Soccer Plus, and a new premium TV channel from Machinima. Epix Hits, a new channel that is paired with a VOD library, is also available on PS Vue as a premium pack with Showtime for $13.99 per month (or $11.49 for PlayStation Plus members), and in the PS Vue Elite tier, or as an add-on to the service's Access and Core packages.