At CES, Hope for Making Cable Cutting Easier

It ain’t easy being a cable cutter. You have to juggle remotes and services, and you still don’t always watch exactly what you want. But in 2016 at CES, the tech industry promised to make life a little easier for people braving television’s online frontier.

Amid this annual confab’s product launches and new TVs, two ideas stand out: Finding what you want to watch faster in a sea of channels and apps—and getting more content without a cable subscription. Sling TV, the $20-a-month live streaming service that made its debut at 2015’s CES, unveiled plans to completely overhaul its app. It’s more than cosmetic—Sling 2.0 uses our individual and collective viewing habits to highlight shows we’d be most likely to watch at any moment. (These companies are tracking that data anyway, so we might as well benefit from it.) The new Sling app, due in the next three months, lets you identify your must-see TV. TV makers are also helping people find more to watch. Most of the biggest brands unveiled new smart TV software that doesn’t just put streaming apps front and center, but also the shows they contain. You don’t have to sit there, trying to remember, say, which service streams “Jessica Jones.” (It’s Netflix.) For its 2016 TVs, LG worked with a company called Xumo on a feature that combines video from a range of different sources—like BuzzFeed, Popsugar and yes, The Wall Street Journal—into a single searchable guide. And for cable cutters who get their content from multiple devices like Xboxes, Samsung is adding tech to its 2016 TVs that’s smart enough to recognize many add-on boxes. Once identified, the TV’s main clicker can control them as well, so instead of dealing with a sea of remotes, you only have to keep track of one.