One World Sports has inked an expanded deal with Verizon Communications that will bring its content to go90, Verizon’s new "mobile-first" video offering, while also covering HD distribution on FiOS TV and TV Everywhere rights.
On the go90 end, One World Sports is offering access to “all the global sports” carried by the programmer, including baseball from Japan, basketball from China, hockey from Europe and Russia, cricket from England and soccer from the UK, Europe and Asia.
Its HD feed is now offered on FiOS TV channel 597, and can be streamed via the FiOS Mobile app for iOS and Android mobile devices.
Speaking on last week’s Q4 earnings call, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo acknowledged that the go90 app had been downloaded more than 2million times, but said the key to the offering is now downloads but around “viewership and…content,” including content that appeals outside go90’s core millennials audience.
“Internally we have surpassed what we thought we would have at this point in time,” he said. “We have set higher targets for 2016, because we need to build the viewership in a much quicker fashion.”
Go90, he said, isn’t expected to turn a profit “within a one to two-year horizon,” he added. “When we launched it, we said two to three, but it’s probably two years before that will become a profit contributor to the enterprise.”
Verizon launched go90 on October 1, 2015.
