Having introduced itself all the way back in January 2016 at CES, at a time when the virtual MVPD market was at its infancy, Atlanta-based OTT start-up Vidgo has finally announced pricing and packaging for its live-streamed service.
The company has identified a niche in the Latino market, and is offering three vaguely sketched out product tiers for its vMVPD: the $19.99-a-month “Latino” bundle with “20 channels of the most popular Spanish entertainment and sports channels from Latin America”; the $29.99 Latino Mas package with “30 channels from the USA, Central and South America, and Spain”; and the $39.99 Core tier, which has few details.
Vidgo CEO Shane Cannon told Light Reading that his company will offer a slate of live and VOD programming consisting of both local broadcast and cable channels, with cloud DVR. The service will be playable, he said, on iOS and Android mobile devices, Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.
Vidgo hasn’t announced a launch date, but tweeted back on Sept. 1, “Internal Beta underway in preparation for launch.”
Truly, this startup has walked a long road.
In April, Vidgo Cannon touched on the company’s target market while announcing a deal with Harmonic to use the vendor’s VOS media processing platform.
“We’ve identified a significant underserved market in the United States, with millions of consumers that are currently not part of the pay TV ecosystem,” Cannon said.
Vidgo’s Crunchbase profile lists the company being founded in 2017 and receiving $500,000 in private funding to date.
However, at CES 2016, company cofounder Robert Kostensky, a former DirecTV sales and and distribution executive, told reporters that he and another unnamed cofounder had been developing the start-up for the previous seven years, and that Vidgo was preparing to launch in 15 cities.
"We're just dotting the I's and crossing the T's," Kostenky said at the time. Kostenksy is now working for Atlanta-based consulting firm Last Mile Inc., according to his LinkedIn profile, having departed Vidgo in August 2017.
At the time, the only vMVPDs in the market were Dish Network’s Sling TV and Sony’s PlayStation Vue. The virtual pay TV market, however, now has nearly a dozen participants.
Cannon, meanwhile, is a former AT&T wireless executive who is listed on LinkedIn as having joined Vidgo in 2015 as chief marketing officer. He was named CEO in January.
