T-Mobile entered the streaming TV game one year ago with TVision, but there hasn’t been much news on it since then. That’s changing today.
T-Mobile is reportedly in the process of “retooling and redeveloping” the platform behind TVision that it acquired from Layer3 TV. That’s according to sources speaking to Light Reading, who say that T-Mo decided to rework the TVision platform because it didn’t scale the way T-Mobile would’ve liked and because of the lengthy process of merging with Sprint.
As part of the process of retooling TVision, T-Mobile is said to be working with MobiTV, a company who has made an app-based streaming platform used by cable operators and other service providers that works on a variety of streaming devices. T-Mobile said when it launched TVision last year that it planned on bringing the service to “popular third-party TV platforms” so you could download an app and begin watching, so a partnership with MobiTV makes sense.
One benefit of bringing TVision to third-party TV platforms is that many more people would have access to T-Mobile’s service. TVision is currently only available in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC, and Longmont, CO, but by working with MobiTV, T-Mobile hopes to deploy its video streaming service nationwide.
When asked about TVision, T-Mobile only said that “TVision and home entertainment remain important parts of our longer term strategy.”
It’s felt kind of strange that T-Mobile launched TVision last year and then hasn’t said much of anything about it since, but T-Mo’s silence makes a bit more sense when you consider what we’ve heard from today’s report about TVision. T-Mobile has put quite a bit into TVision so far, spending $325 million to acquire Layer3 TV and then launching and continuing to offer TVision, so it’s understandable that T-Mo would want to continue work on TVision and get it to a place where it could be offered nationwide across third-party platforms.
Now that the T-Mobile-Sprint merger is wrapped up — or very nearly, at least — maybe we’ll hear more about TVision in the near future.
Source: Light Reading