Sony Looking To Stream Television Channels To The Web

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Exciting news for the home theater buffs, as you may have a whole new alternative when it comes to getting your content without forking over huge amounts of cash to your local cable or satellite provider. The folks out at Sony are looking to get in the game, with a specific eye toward “competing with Steve Jobs”, so that gives you something of an idea of what they’re looking to do here.

Now, we all know that Sony has a significant presence in the worldwide entertainment markets. They’ve got their own television studio, their own movie studio, their own web-based streaming service in the form of Crackle, and of course, they’ve got the massive array of PlayStation Network users out there. But one thing Sony doesn’t have, really, is its own television network, forcing them to seek distribution through third parties and have to fork over a cut. Sony’s looking to bypass said third parties and attempt to bring their content directly to users through their own distribution network, somewhat similar in nature to iTunes.

In fact, some reports suggest that Sony wants to offer “smaller niche network” style packages that the cable networks don’t quite do so well with. This sounds a lot like, say, the Chiller horror network and the Cloo mystery channel to me, which are both often relegated to upper-tier programming packages that no one really wants to buy in a down economy even if they do like the thought of an all-horror or all-mystery channel, because they often come along with a whole bunch of stuff they’ll never watch.

And this is a move that will destabilize home theater as we know it, because it may well launch a move in which you’ll finally be able to get your programming a la carte by going to the individual studios and getting access to everything they own, which in the case of Sony is a pretty substantial library indeed. Of course, the thing about this is that it’s going to depend largely on the internet for access, which means more troubles with bandwidth unless someone also does something about transmission rates or file sizes.

So what do you guys think here? Will we soon be watching a lot more of our television through our various internet-capable devices? Or will the various issues keep cable television on top a while longer yet? No matter what you think, we’ve got the place for you to fill us in, and that’s the comments section directly below!