Verizon’s Go90 video service hasn’t really caught on, and now it appears that they have made some major layoffs in that division. According to a report out of Variety, Verizon will be using the talent behind Vessel, which it bought late last year, to rebuild the video service. There’s no word on what they are going to do to rebuild Go90, but just that they will be using Vessel’s talent. Additionally, Vessel’s co-founder Richard Tom (who was also the CTO at Hulu in a former life) will be taking the reigns at Go90 and being given the title of CTO of Verizon Digital Entertainment.
As for the layoffs, these were actually carried out last week. Verizon confirmed the move as getting rid of “duplicative resources” and the majority of workers laid off were in their San Jose office. Verizon did note that these layoffs did not show a change in strategy for the wireless carrier, and that they are still all-in with Go90. There’s no word on how many employees are still left at Go90 after these layoffs, but it’s safe to say that 155 is likely a pretty large chunk of the workforce on this video service.
Verizon hasn’t announced any numbers for the amount of people that actually use and/or subscribe to Go90, but it won’t be a large number seeing as they haven’t released them. If they were large or good numbers, then Verizon would be bragging about the number of users they have on Go90. Verizon launched Go90 in 2015 as a new revenue stream for the company. As they have been seeing the growth in the wireless industry stagnate a bit, and figured that video would be a great segment to move into next. This is what led to Verizon buying AOL, and then Yahoo – although the Yahoo deal has been delayed and there is a possibility that it won’t go through – due to the ad technology they use as well as the enormous amount of digital content they have available, all of which is inside Go90 now. That’s also why they picked up Vessel back in October, who is now essentially running the show at Go90.