Streaming the Rio Summer Olympics: Check Out the Competition With Roku, PlayStation Vue and Sling TV

If you’re a cord-cutter and want to see NBC’s America’s Got Talent, you can watch it on Hulu. But what if you’re a cord-cutter and want to watch the Rio Olympics?

Your choices were going to be slim — sign up for cable, borrow your mom’s Comcast login, or subscribe to PlayStation Vue‘s streaming service on a Sony PlayStation or Amazon Fire device — but Roku, PlayStation Vue and Sling TV are giving you some new options.

Like a digital version of the Summer Games, streaming video competitors have been busy launching new devices, new apps and new services this summer to try and win the gold medal for living room supremacy ahead of the Rio Olympics in August. Roku, PlayStation Vue and Sling TV are setting new records in the qualifying rounds:

Roku Streaming Stick

Roku, the market leader in streaming devices with its Roku 3 ($100) and Roku 4 ($130), has outdone itself with the new Roku Streaming Stick ($50). The pack-of-gum-sized device runs the same quad-core processor as the Roku 4, and it’s noticeably faster and half the price of the Roku 3.

The Streaming Stick has apps for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and all the other major streaming services, and it has a clean, intuitive interface for downloading and launching them. It’s like an iPad for your TV. Roku has also made a few changes under the hood, including the addition of search across multiple apps for movies and TV shows and a new feature called My Feed that allows you to set notifications for when a TV show or movie becomes available on one of your apps.

Apple TV ($149) markets itself as “all about apps,” but the conspicuous absence of the market-leading Amazon app is a deal-breaker and at triple the cost of Roku’s Streaming Stick. Amazon’s Fire TV Stick ($39) and Google’s Chromecast ($35) are closer competition, but the Streaming Stick’s major advantages are its screaming fast quad-core processor — Fire TV Stick and Chromecast are still on dual-core processors — and superior user interface.

All things considered, Roku’s new Stick offers the best combination of speed, features, interface and price of all the major TV-connected streaming devices. (Note to those in the market for a new HDTV: You can cut the TV-connected device out completely and opt for one of several new TVs with Roku on board as the default interface.)

Playstation Vue

The $30-a-month Vue streaming service that — surprise! — doesn’t require a PlayStation to use, became available earlier this week for Roku devices. If you’re Team Roku, you’ll be able to watch the Rio Olympics in August without cable.

Sony launched the PlayStation Vue streaming service in select U.S. markets last year. Now it’s available nearly nationwide, has a nearly ubiquitous channel lineup, and has cut the price of its base package from $50 to $30 a month. Available as a standalone service for Amazon devices since fall, Vue launched last week for Roku devices.

Vue’s channel lineup of broadcast networks is a work in progress. In my market, for example, Vue has ABC, NBC and FOX shows on demand but no CBS shows and no live feeds for any of those channels. In big markets like New York and Chicago, all for are available with live feeds and on-demand shows. That list will grow as Vue negotiate carriage deals in more local markets.

The fifth major broadcast network — The CW — is not available at all. A Vue spokesperson told me The CW “has not yet been announced,” but she wouldn’t offer a guess as to whether it would be available before the fall TV season starts. There’s a ZIP code search on Vue’s website where you can see what’s available where you live.

For cable networks, Vue is the current champ. I ran Vue’s base package of 57 channels against a list of top-rated cable networks, and Vue has live feeds and on-demand shows for all but four of the 25 most-watched cable networks. The major omissions are History, Lifetime and A&E — all part of the A&E group — and Hallmark.

Vue’s base package includes Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, so you’re covered on election news. For sports, Vue includes ESPN, ESPN2, FS1 and FS2. For an additional $5 a month, you can add a tier that includes ESPNEWS, ESPNU, NBCSN, SEC Sports, Golf Channel, and the Fox Sports regional network for your area.

Vue’s interface requires a little work to get oriented, but it smartly distinguishes live TV (for watching news and sports) from things you want to watch on demand (movies and TV shows). There’s a My Shows feature that allows you add the shows you watch to an easily accessible list that functions as both the DVR and on-demand functions you’ll recognize from cable.

Your Vue login will provide authentication for popular apps, which may provide more shows and more on-demand episodes than what you see on the Vue app. When I test-drove Playstation Vue on my Roku, I was able to successfully authenticate on the WatchABC, FX NOW, Comedy Central and Bravo Now apps.

If you don’t live in one of the markets where Vue has a carriage deal with the local NBC affiliate, you’ll have to watch Olympics coverage through the NBC Sports app. The live NBC feed is not available for Vue where I live, but I watched the U.S. swimming trials last night on the NBC Sports app for Roku with no problems.

Sling TV

Not to be outdone, Sling TV qualified for the Summer Games this morning with the addition of several NBCUniversal channels to its $25-a-month Sling Blue package. The new channels include USA, Bravo, Syfy and NBC Sports.

Like PlayStation Vue, the NBC network feed is only available in select U.S. markets. Unlike Vue, though, Sling does not provide authentication to most connected-TV apps, and access to the NBC and NBC Sports apps is not part today’s announcement.

A Sling spokesperson told me today that she didn’t have any information about whether Sling would begin authenticating to the NBC and NBC Sports apps before the Olympics, but she noted that authentication to Fox apps like FOX NOW and FOX Sports Go is coming soon.

The new NBCUniversal channels brings Sling TV much closer to parity with PlayStation Vue’s channel lineup. Sling actually has two base packages — Sling Blue ($25 a month) and Sling Orange ($20 a month) — or you can get the two plans combined for $40 a month. Here’s a handy side-by-side comparison. Whether one of the Sling plans or the $30-a-month Vue plan is a better deal for you depends a lot on what networks you watch.

History, Lifetime and A&E, for example, are available on Sling Blue and Sling Orange but are not available on PlayStation Vue’s base plan or either of its premium tiers. ESPN is available on Sling Orange and Vue’s base plan, but is not available on Sling Blue. Throw in the fact that the broadcast networks and app authentication are not uniform across Sling and Vue, the whole thing can be a little maddening.

Aside from the new channels, the biggest thing going for Sling TV is the new interface for its Roku app, which is cleaner and much easier to navigate than the previous Roku interface. The “My TV” default screen features your favorite channels, shows you haven’t finished watching yet, and shows you’ve marked as your favorites. Where the previous interface was more like a cable programming grid, the new interface puts live channels in On Now and both live and on-demand content by channel in Guide.

Sling TV and PlayStation Vue both put too much emphasis on the live feeds of networks that aren’t showing live content. Who among us wants to watch the last 10 minutes of a random episode of Family Guy on TBS? I do not. That’s a relic of cable TV that the streaming services should leave behind or at least give a much lower priority to in their interfaces.

More competition is on the way. As Sling TV and PlayStation Vue continue adding to their channel lineups and tweaking their interfaces, DirecTV is negotiating licensing deals for the planned fall launch of its skinny bundle. Hulu plans to launch its own skinny bundle next year.

Things move fast in the internet TV world.

[You can buy the Roku Streaming Stick at Amazon or Best Buy]

[You can buy the Playstation 4 at Amazon, Best Buy, or Gamestop]