Could Verizon’s streaming service be failing, just as AT&T plans to launch theirs? DIRECTV Now is expected to launch in Novmber, although details are sparse. We believe it will be 100 channels, and start at $35 a month, but it’s hard to know more… yet.
In the meantime, we tend to forget that Verizon has a streaming TV service called Go90, and although it’s limited to mobile devices with Verizon data plans, it’s still a thing. It didn’t show up in any recent surveys of top apps or streaming services, but to be fair… it exists.
But maybe it won’t, not for much longer. The evidence points to the service failing in the marketplace, and the latest news seems more like desperation than anything else. Our friends at DSLReports say that Verizon is “zero rating” their latest sports package in an effort to shore up their service. By zero rating, they can offer streaming basketball, football and soccer without affecting data plan usage; it’s getting to be a fairly common practice and is used by AT&T to exempt DIRECTV content from data caps.
The difference here is that while AT&T continues its upward arc toward offering consistent, high-quality entertainment to its customers, Verizon seems a bit aimless. In 2016, they stopped providing landline and wireline internet to several states, offloading that entire operation to Frontier Communications. Their television service continues to lose subscribers and it’s hard to find a real positive ending to the story they’re continuing to spin.
But then again, I’m biased. I think that AT&T and DIRECTV are moving in the right direction, and Verizon isn’t. They’re a fine company but I think that they haven’t been able to really move past being a cell phone company, which is really only one of the things you have to be today. Today’s customers want a consistent entertainment experience no matter where they go, and they want a provider who can give them that. Right now, that’s not hard to find, but there’s only one provider who can do it. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise to find the other companies trying to figure out a way to do it.
