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Verizon Television The Internet

Verizon Loses 18,000 Pay TV Subscribers, Signals Delay For Live TV Streaming Service (hollywoodreporter.com) 42

Posted by BeauHD from the sign-of-the-times dept.
Verizon announced on Thursday that its FiOS video service lost 18,000 net pay TV subscribers in the third quarter, compared with the addition of 36,000 subscribers in the year-ago period and 15,000 subscriber drop in the second quarter. Hollywood Reporter reports: The company said the drop in the latest quarter was "reflecting the ongoing shift from traditional linear video to over-the-top offerings." Verizon, led by chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam, ended the third quarter with a total of 4.6 million subscribers to its FiOS video service, which competes with cable and satellite TV companies. Asked about a planned over-the-top (OTT) TV service from Verizon, Ellis said that the company continues to feel that "there's an opportunity for us to play," but signaling a delay, he emphasized that the company "doesn't want to launch a me-too product." He didn't provide any guidance on when the OTT service would launch, saying that was still "TBD" (to be determined), or what content it could offer beyond saying it was likely to be built "around live programming." Verizon also reported Thursday that it added 66,000 net new FiOS broadband connections in the third quarter to end it with 5.8 million.
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Verizon Loses 18,000 Pay TV Subscribers, Signals Delay For Live TV Streaming Service More

Verizon Loses 18,000 Pay TV Subscribers, Signals Delay For Live TV Streaming Service

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  • normally (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 19, 2017 @09:51PM (#55400997)

    when a company loses business, they lower the damn prices.... but NOOOOOO not pay television services. they gouge the remaining subscribers to try to "make up" the lost profits instead.

    captcha: ignorant

    • when a company loses business, they lower the damn prices.... but NOOOOOO not pay television services. they gouge the remaining subscribers to try to "make up" the lost profits instead.

      It's like insurance pricing. You need a large pool of healthy people paying premiums to support the smaller pool of sick(er) people using services. In this case, the smaller the pool of people forced to also pay for things, like Disney requiring providers to carry ESPN [latimes.com] (and other Disney networks) in order to carry The Disney Channel, the higher the prices for the rest of us (who don't give a shit about ESPN1-n).

    • Re:normally (Score:5, Interesting)

      by deviated_prevert ( 1146403 ) on Friday October 20, 2017 @05:34AM (#55402097) Journal

      when a company loses business, they lower the damn prices.... but NOOOOOO not pay television services. they gouge the remaining subscribers to try to "make up" the lost profits instead.

      captcha: ignorant

      Here in Canada the CRTC tried to force the providers to unbundle the channel package choices. In areas where you cannot possibly get OTA signals the cable companies know that they have you by the shorts to say the least and it made no difference. I have had cable for far too long and been gouged by the assholes it seems forever! If it were not for the fact that my wife would leave I would cut the friggin' cord once and for all and just listen to what little is left of good radio, like the CBC and some American public radio we can still somewhat get where I live.

      The greedy cable assholes seem to regularly find a way to increase the costs without providing value for dollar and get away with it because there is no choice. Because they also own and dominate the satellite industry you get hosed even worse if you switch to satellite. They are your ISP, telephone regardless of whether or not you chose them or the TELCO they dominate all incoming and outgoing communications. Their prices are currently greater than the costs for essential services of heating, water, sewer and taxes combined and they manage to get away with it because you have no alternative. The telco(s) even own all the cellular communication towers and gouge the hell out of you if you try to do anything other than make phone calls with cellular.

      In the end we are stuck paying to watch mish mash rehashes of the same shows and then paying for their advertising slot time. The truth is the "network TV" supported by advertising is completely dying, cable is killing it and very slowly stealing all of their add revenue streams. What cable has done to replace network tv is to make up garbage rehashes of content put together to create a smoke and mirrors illusion of their advertising ridden ridiculous "1000 channel universe". The reality is that they do this to avoid content production costs and continue to suck on the teats of what little is left of the old networks.

  • The Real Shift (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Maybe its just a shift in consumers finally being able to say "FUCK YOU" to $50-200 cable subscription fees for 200+ channels that we don't really want. That we really only want two or three of them, and those channels are either offering direct streaming packages of their own for a good price, or are offering their content on Netflix/Hulu, also for a good price. Its about $$$$, not just stream. It just so happens that the streaming people figured out the economics of not fucking over a consumer is a great

  • boo hoo. cry me a river (Score:4, Informative)

    by darthsilun ( 3993753 ) on Thursday October 19, 2017 @09:58PM (#55401037)

    Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, you name it. Twenty years ago when I was willing to pay for a la carte they said no.

    I have an antenna, but even so I barely watch any OTA even. There's a few things I watch on streaming sites; I pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime, and I use the family share from my daughter's Hulu. I miss the days when "free" Hulu actually had good content. I get a lot of reading done. I work on other hobbies. I don't miss it.

    Streaming FTW.

  • trust busters (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Thursday October 19, 2017 @10:21PM (#55401115) Journal

    Here's a thought: If a company sells bandwidth, it should not be allowed to sell content.

    • Isn't that how broadcast TV used to work? I think that's why CBS made Star Trek: TNG but it aired on Fox and so on. The rule change was, if I recall correctly, partly responsible for a lot of the media consolidation that has happened since. I doubt that you'd see any movement politically to go back to the way things were.
  • with buffering. etc...in my experience, Verizon offers nothing worth paying for.

  • > or what content it could offer beyond saying it was likely to be built "around live programming."

    To me that is code speak for content that contains unskippable commercials. Exactly what consumers do not want. "Live" also implies no time shifting and no storage. Exactly what consumers do not want.

    Wow, what wonderful way to fight declining video customers!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Reality is, interactive content is slowly but surely strangling them out of business. The idiot box can not compete with online gaming and the cheaper online gaming becomes and the greater the choice, the worse it will become, especially with growing US poverty, the majority no longer able to afford that service and of course the Luddites, the majority technophobe elderly dying off. Add in social media and much broader video distribution, canned content stuffed full of commercials screaming at you, is just

  • Hardly Surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nwf ( 25607 ) on Thursday October 19, 2017 @11:20PM (#55401335)

    I have FiOS and I can see why they are losing customers. Their prices have been constantly increasing. We crossed $250/mo and I decided to drop equipment and go back to a contract. That's still $177/mo. Their pricing for equipment is aggravating. More so than Comcast. CableCards are $4/mo. That's outrageous. Their most basic cable box (no DVR, no guide) is $5/mo. I tried to drop some channels to save money, but was told my price wouldn't change with fewer channels unless I gave up almost all HD channels. Once I'm done with this contract, I'm leaning toward dropping the TV portion. Plus their DVRs are pathetic. My ReplayTV from the late 1990s remains better than anything they offer. Even so, I'll likely have to jump to Comcast since FiOS won't offer decent rates on internet only for existing customers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by imidan ( 559239 )

      I'll likely have to jump to Comcast

      I visited some relatives who have Comcast Xfinity a while back. It wasn't working right, which meant we had to keep resetting the cable box. That thing takes longer to boot up than my desktop PC. It took *minutes* after we turned it on to be able to watch TV. And then, the interface lag between pushing a button on the remote and seeing the results on the screen is so long, it made me think I hadn't successfully pushed the button. I realize there's some delay there for dec

  • Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wyattstorch516 ( 2624273 ) on Thursday October 19, 2017 @11:31PM (#55401365)

    The only content that needs to be broadcast are sports and news. Maybe the first run showing of big shows like Game of Thrones but everything else can be consumed via streaming. The cable companies had better find a way to pare down these bundles or they won't have any video customers yet.

    • No reason why you can't stream sports too. Stream becomes available when the event starts, and available anytime after. They already offer streaming news stations-.

      • You can't do streams on something like the Super Bowl or the World Series. There is not enough server bandwidth to provide each user with an individual stream. They tried this with the Oscars and it crashed and that was with it also being available in broadcast.

        • Why not? They just didn't provide enough server bandwidth for that stream. In the future, they will.

  • I'd be quite happy if Verizon offered a me too, mainly having a means to watch ALL subscribed channels via a web player. TimeWarnerSpectrum had this for years and it worked very well even over their unreliable and patheticly slow connections. Another welcome me too would be a properly working 3rd party ID service. When using Fox2Go on mobile the login via Verizon typically does not work. This wouldn't be "copying what others do", but considered catching up. For what they charge their service and devices sho
  • Just what the world needs, another meaningless and arcane term for something that could be explained in just as many words.

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