Newsletter 
The New York Times is reporting this morning that Verizon is going to be launching their video streaming service at some point this week. It’s said to be an over-the-top video streaming service and named “Go90”. In fact, there is already a website set up for it. According to the NYT, the service will be free but ad-supported. The most interesting part of this is that it will be available for those that are not on Verizon. So if you’re on Sprint, AT&T or T-Mobile, you’ll still be able to use their service on your smartphone. Go90 is aimed at the 18-to-34-year-old demographic as well. Not too surprising, since they are the ones that are the biggest cord-cutters these days.
The report also states that Go90 will feature some live events as well as original web series and prime-time television. Instead of having a number of channels available on the service, Verizon will have popular shows from networks including Discovery, NFL Network, ESPN, Food Network and Comedy Central. The service is also going to be including popular online series from AwesomenessTV, Vice, Tastemade and Machinima. All part of that AOL acquisition that took place not too long ago.
In this day and age, you’d expect Twitter to have some part in this, and it does. According to the New York Times, Twitter and Facebook will be integrated into Go90. Where customers will be encouraged to share video clips on both social media networks. There are also plans to expand that to more social media networks in the future (hello Google+?). The New York Times also stated that Verizon is thinking about expanding the service to televisions, but for now the company is content on keeping it as a mobile-only platform. But as things often do, that could change.
We’ve been hearing about Verizon’s video streaming service for quite some time now. The rumor mill only got stronger when they bought AOL earlier this year. Many thought AOL was gone, but they actually own a few websites named Tech Crunch, HuffingtonPost and a few others. So it was a big acquisition to get Go90 on their feet and running.