T-Mobile officially completed the acquisition of Layer3 TV, the third largest wireless carrier in the United States said Tuesday. Originally announced last month, the deal was presented as a starting point for T-Mobile to launch its own TV service in 2018. That plan is still on but no availability details on the upcoming offering have yet been provided by the telecom giant. Consumers interested in receiving real-time updates about the initiative can sign up for them by referring to the banner below, with T-Mobile promising that doing so will ensure they receive an exclusive offer to purchase its subscription package once the platform goes live.
As Layer3 TV has now been officially absorbed by T-Mobile, active development of the new TV service should be underway. The Bellevue, Washington-based company previously provided some general illustrations of how its platform may look like but the project is still understood to be in a relatively early phase of development and more in-depth testing is yet to start. Due to that state of affairs, most industry watchers aren’t expecting the offering to launch before mid-2018. Layer3 TV that’s advertising its solution as “the new cable” is still doing business in select U.S. cities and should continue doing so going forward. The acquisition itself was primarily made so that T-Mobile can access the company’s proprietary technologies allowing it to offer a comprehensive Internet TV package with support for 4K resolutions and multiple displays. The upcoming service is being presented as the firm’s attempt to fight the cable corporations and their business practices which it describes as predatory.
The platform should be conceptually and technologically similar to Layer3 TV’s existing system, meaning consumers shouldn’t expect T-Mobile to launch a new Netflix with a heavy focus on original programming. Instead, the solution will be dedicated to covering as many cable channels as possible, allowing users to stream and record high-quality video. The exact scope of the platform’s library is presumably still being determined and may be impacted by AT&T’s pending acquisition of Time Warner which owns many popular cable channels through its subsidiary Turner, though preventing T-Mobile from licensing them (at a reasonable price) would be the kind of behavior that the Department of Justice is now claiming it’s trying to stop by suing to block the deal.
T-Mobile TV Service