By Leonard Robinson
T-Mobile is throwing in the towel after a failed attempt to make its mark on the home entertainment market.
The nation’s second-largest wireless provider announced on March 29 that it would begin pushing customers away from TV Vision, T-Mobile’s home entertainment service, and towards Google’s YouTube TV.
“We are welcoming YouTube TV and Philo to the TVision Initiative. As part of an expansive, new, multi-year agreement with Google, we’re going to make YouTube TV our premium live TV service,” read the company’s statement. “And we are announcing a new partnership with Philo as our new base live TV service, starting at just $10 per month, exclusively for T-Mobile customers.”
In 2020, T-Mobile relaunched a television service to reach its existing wireless customers. The base of prospective customers included current cable subscribers and households who have eliminated pay-TV from their monthly expenses. Many of the latter have chosen to purchase broadband internet service without a cable subscription and subscribe to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and other similar services for content.
T-Mobile expected that the new product would serve as a supplement to its home broadband-internet service, which is expected to reach customers by the end of the year.
This is the second attempt from T-Mobile to enter the home entertainment market after purchasing Layer3 TV for $325 million in 2018. Since then, the company has worked to acquire rights to carry traditional live TV channels to compete with its bigger rivals.
Rivals of T-Mobile, such as Sony, have either eliminated operations or raised prices on their live TV services. Moreover, virtual pay-tv services have not performed as well as predicted. A similar service offered by AT&T, originally known as DirecTV Now, has shrunk dramatically over the past year after peaking at roughly two million subscribers in 2018.
