Sony switched on Live TV on PS5 for United States accounts on August 31. You open the Media tab, pick the new icon, sign in with the same PSN account, and you get more than 100 free channels with ads: Lionsgate movie streams, Crunchyroll anime, FOX Sports, UFC, NBC News Now, The Walking Dead, Hot Ones, the usual FAST-TV pile. Canada is next on the list. Other regions are "we'll see."
Grace Chen, who runs advertising and loyalty at PlayStation, framed it as a convenient way to watch stuff without leaving the console. That is true. It is also a very convenient way to keep a PS5 in the living room after the game is finished, with Sony collecting ad money instead of ceding the screen to a Roku.
This will not show up as playtime
Media apps do not land on your Games tab. They do not get an hours-played counter. PS Playtime will not suddenly rank "Live TV on PS5" above whatever RPG you abandoned in July. If you spend three hours on a UFC card and twenty minutes in a game, the profile still only knows about the twenty minutes.
Sony's internal picture is different. Monthly active users are accounts that did something, not accounts that finished a campaign. Totoki spent the same week telling the Wall Street Journal that monetizing 125 million monthly users matters more than pushing more PS5 hardware. A free TV app that keeps the machine on, the account signed in, and ads playing is how you pad that number without shipping another exclusive.
So you will start seeing a split. PlayStation can report a healthy, present audience. Your library can look quiet. Both can be accurate.
Why they built it on the Media tab
PS5 already had YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, and the rest. Those apps send the subscription money elsewhere. Live TV on PS5 is Sony Pictures Television's ad-supported stack, sitting in Sony's shell, signed in with Sony's ID. The programming mix is the giveaway — sports and news to win the remote from a partner, anime and movies to keep younger accounts from hopping to a phone.
It also does a small, unglamorous job for anyone with a dormant profile. Watching a channel still counts as using the account. That will not matter for most people. It might matter in Europe, where the terms still describe a 36-month inactivity path toward closure. A cheap way to keep an old login "alive" is now sitting on the home screen, which is a strange sentence to write about a games console.
What to expect in your history
Nothing, basically. Launch a game after a Live TV session and the last-played date updates for the game, not the app. Trophy lists ignore it. Wrap-Up will ignore it. If Sony ever ships a "time on PlayStation" total that includes media, it will not be the same figure as the per-game hours this site reads, and it should not be treated as if it were.
Leave the TV app running overnight and you still should not see a mysterious 12 hours appear on a title in your library. If you do, that is a tracking bug, not Live TV leaking into the games database. We have had enough of those this year already.
Related: why Sony is squeezing the installed base and whether idle time counts as playtime.