For PlayStation Vue, Sony has had a bit of a mixed bag these last 10 days. On one hand, on election day (the day where companies dump bad news in order for it to get drowned out in all the other news taking place), Sony announced that PlayStation Vue would be losing Viacom and with it, channels like Comedy Central, MTV, and Spike would go. But on the other hand, just yesterday, Sony announced the arrival of their streaming service on Apple TV which is a big deal (I’ll be writing a more in-depth piece on that in the future). As I’ve written before, losing Viacom was outside of Sony’s control and either they had to cave into the higher price tag and eat the extra costs, or pass them onto PS Vue users – a true Kobayashi Maru.

So what’s Sony to do in order to satisfy some of their customers who are rightly upset about the loss of channels? Vikki Blake from IGN:

 According to reports on NeoGAF, PlayStation Vue is quietly offering the Showtime discount to subbers as a result of dropping Viacom.

“I just called Vue support and told them that I have heard that people have been getting Showtime for 12 dollars for the whole year due to this Viacom issue. I would like that as well,” writes NeoGAFer Scoobaspeaz. 

Vikki gets a bit more into it but in short, if you’re unhappy about the channel drops and don’t have Showtime, you can call up PlayStation and ask for their Showtime promotion which nets you the premium channel for $12/year. Not too shabby of a deal and one that likely works for both sides, assuming the only shows you wanted to watch weren’t on the now gone channels – Showtime gets a better shot at being in the same conversation as Netflix and HBO with their slate of shows and PS Vue subscribers get to try the channel for the price of two frappuccinos.

For those playing at home, Showtime normally costs $10.99 a month ($8.99 for PS+ members). Do you see yourself trying to take advantage of this deal?