Fran Shammo, EVP and Chief Financial Officer of US telco Verizon, has suggested that conditions are favourable for the planned midsummer launch of its OTT service.

Speaking during Verizon’s Q4 2014 Results Earnings Conference Call, Shammo declined to disclose as to too much what we it was going to do, but said that if you look at the [OTT TV] environment, there were lot of positive things coming out. “So if you look at what Dish has done around some of their recent launches, look at CBS and their own launch of over-the-top with their own programming, this just leads us to a path of content owners are willing to open up their content to different models and that’s exactly what we are going to execute on it. And we are working with many content providers to join that model,” he advised, saying that Verizon would have a lot more to say about that when it launched its first product this coming summer.

Similarly, as far as the new OTT TV model was concerned, he chose not to offer much detail, but advised: “You should not think about it as a traditional linear TV model. It’s going to be, I would think a different type of a model. So, we’ll wait till midsummer when we can talk more about that. But within our plan, we do have those content costs,” he admitted.

In Q4 2014, Verizon added 116,000 net FiOS video customers and 387,000 for the year. It has a total of 5.6 million FiOS video subscribers, which represents 35.8 per penetration, an increase of 80 basis points in 2014.

Categories: Articles, Content, IPTV, OTT, OTT, Rights