Once surpassing 5 million customers and capturing the imagination of forlorn cable TV subscribers with splashy Michael Bay commericals, Verizon Fios TV has hit the cord-cutting skids along with the rest of the linear pay TV business.
The platform shed another 81,000 customers in the second quarter. Fios hasn’t lost massive quarterly chunks of users as, say, the satellite TV platforms have. But it has steadily declined to below 4 million users.
Overall, Verizon posted a strong quarter, beating consensus revenue forecasts from equity analysts with $30.45 billion in sales. Postpaid wireless customers were up. The company’s millimeter wave 5G wireless service is expanding—the fastest, lowest-latency iteration of 5G will reach 60 cities this year, the wireless giant says.
And wired Fios high-speed internet service is still a growing concern—Verizon added 10,000 customers in the second quarter.
But to serve the bundling needs of its customers, Verizon is now mostly relying on third-party streaming services. Verizon already had in place promotional deals to offer subscription OTT services Disney Plus and YouTube TV to its wireline broadband customers when they sign up.
On Thursday, it kicked off a deal with ViacomCBS to natively integrate AVOD platform Pluto TV into devices ranging from smart phons to Fios set-tops.
