Verizon FiOS Expands Mobile TV Support To Android & iPhone, Now Lets You Watch Live TV Outside The Home
For the first time ever, customers of Verizon's FiOS TV service are being allowed to watch live television on their mobile devices when they're out of their homes, and disconnected from their home's Wi-Fi network.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop Verizon opened three years ago, when it said it would put live FiOS TV on the iPad — an offering that stayed tethered to the home Wi-Fi network. The gap was visible as early as November 2010, when Dish slung TV Everywhere to iPhone and Android devices via its Sling technology, leaving FiOS subscribers watching competitors' customers take their channels on the road.
The timing also lands two weeks after negotiators agreed Verizon would pay Vodafone about $130 billion for full control of their U.S. wireless joint venture: out-of-home FiOS streaming runs over Verizon's cellular pipes, making mobile video one of the clearest strategic rationales for owning that network outright. The pickup across The Verge, Engadget and GigaOM shows how closely the pay-TV crowd was tracking whether Verizon would finally unmoor FiOS from the living room.
First-order effects
- FiOS TV subscribers can now watch live television on Android and iPhone away from home for the first time, shifting usage of their paid channel lineups onto Verizon's cellular network.
- Every hour streamed off-Wi-Fi consumes wireless data from the same company selling the subscription, aligning Verizon's FiOS retention play with its wireless data business.
Second-order effects
- Dish, which has offered out-of-home TV Everywhere since 2010, loses its differentiation point, while cable rivals without a mobile equivalent face subscriber pressure to license similar streaming rights.
- Programmers gain leverage: authenticated out-of-home streaming makes per-subscriber mobile rights a negotiating chip in carriage renewals, since the distributor's own network benefits from carrying the streams.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the set-top box stops defining where a pay-TV subscription works — the authenticated app becomes the product, and carriers that own both pipe and content distribution (as Verizon now fully does post-Vodafone) are positioned to price mobile video into data plans.
- That convergence raises the structural question regulators were already circling in mid-2013 over secret interconnection agreements: when the same company controls the network, the subscription, and the delivery path, net neutrality rules become the main check on how mobile TV gets prioritized.
The trend: Pay-TV is migrating from a home-bound pipe to carrier-owned mobile ecosystems, with the $130B Vodafone buyout giving Verizon both the incentive and the infrastructure to lead that shift.