Today Verizon announced their 3rd quarter 2017 earnings and reported a loss of 18,000 Fios Video Customers. In 2016 during the same period Verizon Fios added 36,000 video subscribers.)
In response to these losses Verizon’s CFO Matt Ellis, echoing past comments by Verizon execs, saying, “The traditional TV bundle is not long-term sustainable.”
Verizon is betting that a new live TV streaming service is the answer to their issues. Yet they don’t seem in any rush to launch the service. “This is a space where we think there’s an opportunity for us to play, but we don’t want to launch just a me-too product,” Ellis told analysts. Verizon’s OTT offering will “probably” be geared around live TV programming, but “how and when we launch something will be TBD.”
Verizon is not alone in their loses. AT&T lost subscribers over the same time and Comcast has forecasted a net loss of 100,000 to 150,000 video subscribers in the 3rd quarter of 2017.
This all comes as Bloomberg reported today that Verizon is now planning a spring 2018 launch for their live TV streaming service. Details are still thin but Verizon seems to be hoping a launch of a live TV service will help offset the current loses they are seeing. Yet at the same time, they clearly seem to be in no rush to launch the service.
Source: Variety
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