8 ms·

Verizon go90 burned over $200M trying to catch the eye of millennials

49 points by obituary_latte 10y ago

27182818284 10y ago
The Verizon brand is toxic enough that even without hearing what this has to offer I have a negative opinion on it. For example, I've been so soured on the Verizon apps that get installed to my phone without my permission (pre-installed apps on Android) it makes me incredibly hesitant to even look at adding another app to watch TV offerings I don't know about.
- 67726e 10y ago
  Similarly, Verizon has the best coverage in my area and has begun unlimited plans. Regardless, I have such a negative impression of the company from all the stories I've heard over the years that I'd really only switch if I had no other option. Even then I'd be hesitant.
  - sqeaky 10y ago
    This is my situation. Verizon has the best coverage in Omaha, but I would rather deal with not having cell service in the middle of nowhere on very rare occasions than deal with the kind of pain I see Verizon subscribers go through.
  - JauntTrooper 10y ago
    Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? Comcast, I get. Their business model inspires hatred. They lure you with teaser rates on internet/cable then jack up the price 100%+ after the first year, banking on their local monopoly and their customers' unwillingness to sit on the phone for an hour to jump through hoops and reduce that price to "just" a 20% increase. I've never had a problem with Verizon, though. In fact my experience has been modestly positive. Their cell coverage is good and consistent (no unwanted apps on my iPhone). When I lived back East, we were quite happy Verizon FIOS came to our neighborhood and gave us a superior alternative to Comcast. Are they behaving like Comcast in other areas without alternative internet providers?
    - 67726e 10y ago
      I suppose that's the funny thing, I've not had (too) many problems with Comcast. Then again I lost upwards of eight hours when I moved into my current house because their phone reps set up multiple accounts for me. With Verizon I've heard plenty of stories from friends of lock-in, specious fees, horrible customer service. All the fun stuff you hear from pretty much all the big players. Of course I'm talking strictly mobile service, which T-Mobile delivers adequately enough for me and has for the past five years. Phone service has been very word-of-mouth in my experience, and my friends with Verizon have scared me off of them for a long time. On the flipside T-Mobile did well at winning over a lot of folks I know.
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      > Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? combination of factors. atrocious customer service is a major one. failure to bring FIOS to market at the scale promised to local municipalities is another big issue. generally bad pricing where they extract extra fees from you for absurd reasons is another (not that they're alone in that bad practice).
    - curun1r 10y ago
      From what I can tell, there's two sorts of Verizon customers/ex-customers...those who are happy with the service and those who've had to deal with their customer service representatives, especially as it relates to billing. It's saying something that despite having experienced their network coverage, and it is simply better than anyone else I've tried, I will never use Verizon again. Their service is that bad. In my case, it all started when a family member on our plan had her phone stolen a month before our hardware refresh date. I called them up to find out what could be done. Since it was an iPhone, they said I could only buy a new one at full price since Apple wouldn't let them do early upgrades. My suggestion (pay the ETF) was something they'd apparently never heard of, thought of or had any mechanism in place to handle. After several calls and getting passed around for a bit, one of their representatives had an idea. If I added a new line, swapped the number for a month I could then call in and have the contract switched over once the line no longer had an ETF. My only cost would be $40 for the extra unused line that month. That sounded reasonable...reasonable enough that I asked whether I could do it for all of the lines on my plan to keep the hardware refresh dates in sync. They said no problem. Fast forward one month, I call in to have the contracts transferred over. Their response, "we don't do that anymore." The best they could do was put what was now 3 unused lines on hold so I wasn't paying for them each month, but that would freeze the hardware refresh date/ETFs at the full 2 years. And even that could only be done for 3 months. I must have called them 20 times over the six months I tried to get the issue resolved and I spoke to countless supervisors. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find, which I told them many times was my option of last resort, was to switch to another carrier who would pay my ETFs. Their support couldn't make it happen. The whole ordeal cost me somewhere between $500-$1k. I'm now with a different carrier with an inferior network. I've missed a few calls on occasion and had some drop from time to time. But their support is friendly and able to solve problems. So I'm happy. I also know I'm not alone. In searching the internet for how to resolve these problems with Verizon, you see there are large numbers of customers like me who are subjected to their byzantine billing system and end up being given an endless runaround.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    Verizon's coverage is excellent but it's network is over-congested (probably from building out coverage without also expanding backbone capacity to keep up). If you were the only person ever on the Verizon network it would be the best in North America. As it is now though it underperforms almost everything in densely populated areas.
- evan_ 10y ago
  In the marketing I've seen they don't even mention that go90 is Verizon- this is the first I'm learning that.
  - iamatworknow 10y ago
    The only advertising I see for it is during national NBA games, and I believe it's always stated as "go90 by Verizon" on there. I'm a millennial and I've never even been slightly curious as to what it is or does.
    - evan_ 10y ago
      I've seen TV spots as well as ads on podcasts- the most recent How Did This Get Made for instance has the host read an ad for a Go90 show he's on. It actually kind of made me want to watch it, since it had him and several other people I know from their appearances on that and other podcasts.
      - iamatworknow 10y ago
        Maybe it would be appealing to some people, but in the context of the NBA I'm pretty sure the ad was talking about getting "behind the scenes" access to players and game highlights or something. For me that niche has already been filled by sites like reddit.com/r/nba (where, honestly, a lot of NBA news sites are poaching original content anyway). I don't need another app cluttering up my phone for that stuff. I don't really care about what LeBron James has for lunch. And if I want to know what goes on behind the scenes in the NBA, I'm much more likely to watch a high quality professional production like the Toronto Raptor's "Open Gym" series that's freely available on YouTube. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I haven't been sold on what makes go90 worthwhile, and from the looks of it I'm not alone.
PaulHoule 10y ago
I remember the Go90 ads that looked exactly like the MTV "M" ad that ran in 1981. It was cool at the time but now it just looks dated. As a Generation X-er I remember that as a betrayal, when a few years later the 60+ Sumner Redstone decided that we couldn't watch music videos anymore, MTV stopped showing music videos and became yet another whistlestop in a vast wasteland of reality television.
- oxide 10y ago
  My grandparents tend to watch a lot of reality TV. On the History Channel, Discovery Channel, all the channels that used to have interesting, educational content like documentaries. I've noticed it's the same kind of show (mostly): someone lives in a harsh environment or otherwise away from civilization. I think they're...living vicariously through it? They love the outdoors, hunting and fishing, etc. They are a bit too old and tired day-to-day to go and do the things they always have loved, but they get something out of watching others brave the elements.
  - TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
    This has always been the case, popular shows and movies always tend to reflect the culture at the time. During the 50's and 60's, the bad guy in every movie was Russian. Vampire and plague movies became popular during the recession to ride the general feeling of unease and lack of control. Now with only a specific demographic watching TV nowadays, of course shows will reflect that group more than others.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    They would probably enjoy "Alone", if they haven't seen it yet. (A dozen people get dropped off on separate parts of Vancouver island, and have to survive the longest to win prize money. No help, total isolation, and they have to film everything themselves.) One of the better done "reality survival shows" I've seen; sort of like a batch of Les Strouds (Survivorman).
ocschwar 10y ago
If they keep assuming that millennials are frivolous consumers, they're going to keep losing money.
- alpeb 10y ago
  Given the popularity of frivolous media, ain't most people just frivolous consumers?
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Totally. It's just that the notion that millenials are more frivolous because they don't buy cars and big houses seems so predominant in people's minds.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
This sounds like something out of SiliconValley the tv show. Specifically the aquihiring of startups and churning through the tech teams and hoping the next aquihired team builds better tech, when the problem is likely not tech in the first place.
rdtsc 10y ago
What the don't realize is not only do they have to create something interesting and useful, they have to overcome the negative associations people have with Verizon as a brand. Instead of a making it a Verizon thing, it should have been a separate entity owned by Verizon but not visibly associated with it. Make a faux-startup thing, with a separate app name which skips every other vowel and such and start from there. I distrust and dislike Verizon. Had their pricey FIOS service for a year and despite having a high bandwidth they kept throttling Youtube videos. So I switched to a regular cable provide, pays half as much, have less advertised bandwidth but much better experience. Their billing was a mess. They took a deposit initially to avoid running a credit check on me with the idea of returning it back. It was a pain to get that deposit back. Now they are sending a salesperson to my door every 3 or 4 months with "special deals" trying to convince me to go back to them (since they already installed their on-premises equipment).
- justinsaccount 10y ago
  > Had their pricey FIOS service for a year and despite having a high bandwidth they kept throttling Youtube videos. They weren't directly throttling things, they just let their peering connections max out until things broke. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizon-bandwidth-provider-blame-each-other-for-slow-netflix-streaming/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/veriz... > He said he believes that Verizon's decision to limit Netflix bandwidth is due to Verizon wanting customers to use its own streaming video services, such as Redbox Instant. I'm not sure if anything has really changed in 4 years.
everdev 10y ago
As a soccer fan, the service is great as it has live La Liga games for free. They have some Mythbusters episodes too. The original content they try to push looks awful though.
chasing 10y ago
I remember seeing ads for this around my neighborhood that were essentially baffling. Very trendy, but with zero communication about what go90 actually purported to do. Google "go90 ads" and you'll see what I mean. Bright colors and slogans like "To watch, cut & share all the awesome" and "Brace yourself, entertainment is coming" which mean, effectively, nothing. ("Ooh, I love entertainment. Along with content it's one of my favorite things to experience.") Also, "go90" is a terrible name.
- ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago
  When it showed up on my phone one day (probably after an update), I thought it was some kind of malware and removed it. It looked like the kind of crap I removed off windows xp computers back when I did tech support.
- niftich 10y ago
  If I recall the first TV ad they did was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLYPMmZfwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLYPMmZfwY, which is the only one I saw -- but I saw it a lot on late-night television; probably Comedy Central or Adult Swim. The ads were problematic in the sense that they were essentially context-free, and while "us millennials" are enticed by shows we want to stream, we're also very cautious and skeptical of heavily advertised services at a late hour. In me, the garish palette of the ads and the name evoked MTV-style advertising of the mid-1990s, when I was much younger, and bombarded with sketchy ads for polyphonic ringtones, J2ME games, and other services for brick cellphones on late-night television: an association that made me more wary than anything else, especially since the offered content appeared decidedly second-tier.
  - chasing 10y ago
    I don't generally think Hacker News is the place to post memes, but this ad is the marketing embodiment of this "30 Rock" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele_dj3ud38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele_dj3ud38
- smitherfield 10y ago
  > Also, "go90" is a terrible name. I think it's supposed to be 1337-5p34k. (Still terrible).
smitherfield 10y ago
I'm a millennial and this is the first I've even heard of it, which doesn't bode well for them.
ballenf 10y ago
> Beyond the operation's length, its nature was haphazard and confusing, according to members of the team. Partway through the metadata project, all the team's contracts were supposed to end, but it was clear the job wasn't complete. Management asked part of the team to stay on but pretended everyone was getting the ax. > "We all had to act like we were all leaving," one former contractor said. "They asked us not to say anything." Sounds like someone very inexperienced calling the shots. Also asleep at the wheel. I really don't think version 3.0 is going to solve the root problems with this project.
vwcx 10y ago
Sometimes you have to spend $200 million to get a 2000 word "news story" about your product.
dmix 10y ago
Strange, I'm from Canada and I've never heard of go90. Is it another American only service? Edit: yep, "US only", two years after launching... we're one of the best consumers of Netflix like services because of silly licensing deals. Netflix made a big deal about launching their streaming service in Canada and did it promptly.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bertlequant 10y ago
I remember applying to Verizon when I was still in school. I had to give up because their application kept throwing readable database errors and wouldn't let me continue to the subsequent pages. Weeks later, one of their recruiters contacted me and asked if I wanted to finish my application. I said no.
Shivetya 10y ago
Success is simple Verizon. Deliver me good phone, text, and data, at reasonable rates. You are not doing that now. Extra services are meaningless if your not competitive on your core offerings.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  ISPs fear being dumb pipes. They want "additional revenue channels" like selling profiles on their subscribers to advertisers, or better yet, vertically integrating with advertisers. Look at everything ISPs do and how badly they don't want to be water or power or sewer companies like they should be, especially given how few choices there are in a given physical location (for wired ISPs). With this FCC chair and political climate, however, I doubt we'll see change any time soon.
irq-1 10y ago
Why didn't they make a video calling app and go after Skype? They're a phone company making a video centric, mobile app. Make it open and everywhere with easy no/low cost usage... oh, right, it's Verizon. They have to own it all and monopolize it from hardware to software to network to content to...
fl0wenol 10y ago
I don't understand the logic of the original vision at all. You have Netflix for Hollywood and TV, Youtube for more independent stuff, Crunchyroll for anime, Amazon maybe for stragglers, and Twitch for livestreams. And Hulu was there. And so on. There isn't room for another general purpose video platform icon on someone's home screen. That's not a great strategy. It was a mistake to not find the niche like live sports from the very beginning and building the campaign/strategy around that. Then drive that wedge open.

The Verizon brand is toxic enough that even without hearing what this has to offer I have a negative opinion on it. For example, I've been so soured on the Verizon apps that get installed to my phone without my permission (pre-installed apps on Android) it makes me incredibly hesitant to even look at adding another app to watch TV offerings I don't know about.

67726e 10y ago
Similarly, Verizon has the best coverage in my area and has begun unlimited plans. Regardless, I have such a negative impression of the company from all the stories I've heard over the years that I'd really only switch if I had no other option. Even then I'd be hesitant.
- sqeaky 10y ago
  This is my situation. Verizon has the best coverage in Omaha, but I would rather deal with not having cell service in the middle of nowhere on very rare occasions than deal with the kind of pain I see Verizon subscribers go through.
- JauntTrooper 10y ago
  Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? Comcast, I get. Their business model inspires hatred. They lure you with teaser rates on internet/cable then jack up the price 100%+ after the first year, banking on their local monopoly and their customers' unwillingness to sit on the phone for an hour to jump through hoops and reduce that price to "just" a 20% increase. I've never had a problem with Verizon, though. In fact my experience has been modestly positive. Their cell coverage is good and consistent (no unwanted apps on my iPhone). When I lived back East, we were quite happy Verizon FIOS came to our neighborhood and gave us a superior alternative to Comcast. Are they behaving like Comcast in other areas without alternative internet providers?
  - 67726e 10y ago
    I suppose that's the funny thing, I've not had (too) many problems with Comcast. Then again I lost upwards of eight hours when I moved into my current house because their phone reps set up multiple accounts for me. With Verizon I've heard plenty of stories from friends of lock-in, specious fees, horrible customer service. All the fun stuff you hear from pretty much all the big players. Of course I'm talking strictly mobile service, which T-Mobile delivers adequately enough for me and has for the past five years. Phone service has been very word-of-mouth in my experience, and my friends with Verizon have scared me off of them for a long time. On the flipside T-Mobile did well at winning over a lot of folks I know.
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    > Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? combination of factors. atrocious customer service is a major one. failure to bring FIOS to market at the scale promised to local municipalities is another big issue. generally bad pricing where they extract extra fees from you for absurd reasons is another (not that they're alone in that bad practice).
  - curun1r 10y ago
    From what I can tell, there's two sorts of Verizon customers/ex-customers...those who are happy with the service and those who've had to deal with their customer service representatives, especially as it relates to billing. It's saying something that despite having experienced their network coverage, and it is simply better than anyone else I've tried, I will never use Verizon again. Their service is that bad. In my case, it all started when a family member on our plan had her phone stolen a month before our hardware refresh date. I called them up to find out what could be done. Since it was an iPhone, they said I could only buy a new one at full price since Apple wouldn't let them do early upgrades. My suggestion (pay the ETF) was something they'd apparently never heard of, thought of or had any mechanism in place to handle. After several calls and getting passed around for a bit, one of their representatives had an idea. If I added a new line, swapped the number for a month I could then call in and have the contract switched over once the line no longer had an ETF. My only cost would be $40 for the extra unused line that month. That sounded reasonable...reasonable enough that I asked whether I could do it for all of the lines on my plan to keep the hardware refresh dates in sync. They said no problem. Fast forward one month, I call in to have the contracts transferred over. Their response, "we don't do that anymore." The best they could do was put what was now 3 unused lines on hold so I wasn't paying for them each month, but that would freeze the hardware refresh date/ETFs at the full 2 years. And even that could only be done for 3 months. I must have called them 20 times over the six months I tried to get the issue resolved and I spoke to countless supervisors. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find, which I told them many times was my option of last resort, was to switch to another carrier who would pay my ETFs. Their support couldn't make it happen. The whole ordeal cost me somewhere between $500-$1k. I'm now with a different carrier with an inferior network. I've missed a few calls on occasion and had some drop from time to time. But their support is friendly and able to solve problems. So I'm happy. I also know I'm not alone. In searching the internet for how to resolve these problems with Verizon, you see there are large numbers of customers like me who are subjected to their byzantine billing system and end up being given an endless runaround.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  Verizon's coverage is excellent but it's network is over-congested (probably from building out coverage without also expanding backbone capacity to keep up). If you were the only person ever on the Verizon network it would be the best in North America. As it is now though it underperforms almost everything in densely populated areas.
evan_ 10y ago
In the marketing I've seen they don't even mention that go90 is Verizon- this is the first I'm learning that.
- iamatworknow 10y ago
  The only advertising I see for it is during national NBA games, and I believe it's always stated as "go90 by Verizon" on there. I'm a millennial and I've never even been slightly curious as to what it is or does.
  - evan_ 10y ago
    I've seen TV spots as well as ads on podcasts- the most recent How Did This Get Made for instance has the host read an ad for a Go90 show he's on. It actually kind of made me want to watch it, since it had him and several other people I know from their appearances on that and other podcasts.
    - iamatworknow 10y ago
      Maybe it would be appealing to some people, but in the context of the NBA I'm pretty sure the ad was talking about getting "behind the scenes" access to players and game highlights or something. For me that niche has already been filled by sites like reddit.com/r/nba (where, honestly, a lot of NBA news sites are poaching original content anyway). I don't need another app cluttering up my phone for that stuff. I don't really care about what LeBron James has for lunch. And if I want to know what goes on behind the scenes in the NBA, I'm much more likely to watch a high quality professional production like the Toronto Raptor's "Open Gym" series that's freely available on YouTube. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I haven't been sold on what makes go90 worthwhile, and from the looks of it I'm not alone.

PaulHoule 10y ago

I remember the Go90 ads that looked exactly like the MTV "M" ad that ran in 1981. It was cool at the time but now it just looks dated. As a Generation X-er I remember that as a betrayal, when a few years later the 60+ Sumner Redstone decided that we couldn't watch music videos anymore, MTV stopped showing music videos and became yet another whistlestop in a vast wasteland of reality television.

oxide 10y ago
My grandparents tend to watch a lot of reality TV. On the History Channel, Discovery Channel, all the channels that used to have interesting, educational content like documentaries. I've noticed it's the same kind of show (mostly): someone lives in a harsh environment or otherwise away from civilization. I think they're...living vicariously through it? They love the outdoors, hunting and fishing, etc. They are a bit too old and tired day-to-day to go and do the things they always have loved, but they get something out of watching others brave the elements.
- TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
  This has always been the case, popular shows and movies always tend to reflect the culture at the time. During the 50's and 60's, the bad guy in every movie was Russian. Vampire and plague movies became popular during the recession to ride the general feeling of unease and lack of control. Now with only a specific demographic watching TV nowadays, of course shows will reflect that group more than others.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  They would probably enjoy "Alone", if they haven't seen it yet. (A dozen people get dropped off on separate parts of Vancouver island, and have to survive the longest to win prize money. No help, total isolation, and they have to film everything themselves.) One of the better done "reality survival shows" I've seen; sort of like a batch of Les Strouds (Survivorman).

ocschwar 10y ago

If they keep assuming that millennials are frivolous consumers, they're going to keep losing money.

alpeb 10y ago
Given the popularity of frivolous media, ain't most people just frivolous consumers?
- ocschwar 10y ago
  Totally. It's just that the notion that millenials are more frivolous because they don't buy cars and big houses seems so predominant in people's minds.

quantumhobbit 10y ago

This sounds like something out of SiliconValley the tv show. Specifically the aquihiring of startups and churning through the tech teams and hoping the next aquihired team builds better tech, when the problem is likely not tech in the first place.

rdtsc 10y ago

What the don't realize is not only do they have to create something interesting and useful, they have to overcome the negative associations people have with Verizon as a brand. Instead of a making it a Verizon thing, it should have been a separate entity owned by Verizon but not visibly associated with it. Make a faux-startup thing, with a separate app name which skips every other vowel and such and start from there. I distrust and dislike Verizon. Had their pricey FIOS service for a year and despite having a high bandwidth they kept throttling Youtube videos. So I switched to a regular cable provide, pays half as much, have less advertised bandwidth but much better experience. Their billing was a mess. They took a deposit initially to avoid running a credit check on me with the idea of returning it back. It was a pain to get that deposit back. Now they are sending a salesperson to my door every 3 or 4 months with "special deals" trying to convince me to go back to them (since they already installed their on-premises equipment).

justinsaccount 10y ago
> Had their pricey FIOS service for a year and despite having a high bandwidth they kept throttling Youtube videos. They weren't directly throttling things, they just let their peering connections max out until things broke. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/verizon-bandwidth-provider-blame-each-other-for-slow-netflix-streaming/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/veriz... > He said he believes that Verizon's decision to limit Netflix bandwidth is due to Verizon wanting customers to use its own streaming video services, such as Redbox Instant. I'm not sure if anything has really changed in 4 years.

everdev 10y ago

As a soccer fan, the service is great as it has live La Liga games for free. They have some Mythbusters episodes too. The original content they try to push looks awful though.

chasing 10y ago

I remember seeing ads for this around my neighborhood that were essentially baffling. Very trendy, but with zero communication about what go90 actually purported to do. Google "go90 ads" and you'll see what I mean. Bright colors and slogans like "To watch, cut & share all the awesome" and "Brace yourself, entertainment is coming" which mean, effectively, nothing. ("Ooh, I love entertainment. Along with content it's one of my favorite things to experience.") Also, "go90" is a terrible name.

ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago
When it showed up on my phone one day (probably after an update), I thought it was some kind of malware and removed it. It looked like the kind of crap I removed off windows xp computers back when I did tech support.
niftich 10y ago
If I recall the first TV ad they did was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLYPMmZfwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjLYPMmZfwY, which is the only one I saw -- but I saw it a lot on late-night television; probably Comedy Central or Adult Swim. The ads were problematic in the sense that they were essentially context-free, and while "us millennials" are enticed by shows we want to stream, we're also very cautious and skeptical of heavily advertised services at a late hour. In me, the garish palette of the ads and the name evoked MTV-style advertising of the mid-1990s, when I was much younger, and bombarded with sketchy ads for polyphonic ringtones, J2ME games, and other services for brick cellphones on late-night television: an association that made me more wary than anything else, especially since the offered content appeared decidedly second-tier.
- chasing 10y ago
  I don't generally think Hacker News is the place to post memes, but this ad is the marketing embodiment of this "30 Rock" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele_dj3ud38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ele_dj3ud38
smitherfield 10y ago
> Also, "go90" is a terrible name. I think it's supposed to be 1337-5p34k. (Still terrible).

smitherfield 10y ago

I'm a millennial and this is the first I've even heard of it, which doesn't bode well for them.

ballenf 10y ago

> Beyond the operation's length, its nature was haphazard and confusing, according to members of the team. Partway through the metadata project, all the team's contracts were supposed to end, but it was clear the job wasn't complete. Management asked part of the team to stay on but pretended everyone was getting the ax. > "We all had to act like we were all leaving," one former contractor said. "They asked us not to say anything." Sounds like someone very inexperienced calling the shots. Also asleep at the wheel. I really don't think version 3.0 is going to solve the root problems with this project.

vwcx 10y ago

Sometimes you have to spend $200 million to get a 2000 word "news story" about your product.

dmix 10y ago

Strange, I'm from Canada and I've never heard of go90. Is it another American only service? Edit: yep, "US only", two years after launching... we're one of the best consumers of Netflix like services because of silly licensing deals. Netflix made a big deal about launching their streaming service in Canada and did it promptly.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bertlequant 10y ago

I remember applying to Verizon when I was still in school. I had to give up because their application kept throwing readable database errors and wouldn't let me continue to the subsequent pages. Weeks later, one of their recruiters contacted me and asked if I wanted to finish my application. I said no.

Shivetya 10y ago

Success is simple Verizon. Deliver me good phone, text, and data, at reasonable rates. You are not doing that now. Extra services are meaningless if your not competitive on your core offerings.

seanp2k2 10y ago
ISPs fear being dumb pipes. They want "additional revenue channels" like selling profiles on their subscribers to advertisers, or better yet, vertically integrating with advertisers. Look at everything ISPs do and how badly they don't want to be water or power or sewer companies like they should be, especially given how few choices there are in a given physical location (for wired ISPs). With this FCC chair and political climate, however, I doubt we'll see change any time soon.

irq-1 10y ago

Why didn't they make a video calling app and go after Skype? They're a phone company making a video centric, mobile app. Make it open and everywhere with easy no/low cost usage... oh, right, it's Verizon. They have to own it all and monopolize it from hardware to software to network to content to...

fl0wenol 10y ago

I don't understand the logic of the original vision at all. You have Netflix for Hollywood and TV, Youtube for more independent stuff, Crunchyroll for anime, Amazon maybe for stragglers, and Twitch for livestreams. And Hulu was there. And so on. There isn't room for another general purpose video platform icon on someone's home screen. That's not a great strategy. It was a mistake to not find the niche like live sports from the very beginning and building the campaign/strategy around that. Then drive that wedge open.