Verizon go90 burned over $200M trying to catch the eye of millennials
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Comcast, I get. Their business model inspires hatred. They lure you with teaser rates on internet/cable then jack up the price 100%+ after the first year, banking on their local monopoly and their customers' unwillingness to sit on the phone for an hour to jump through hoops and reduce that price to "just" a 20% increase.
I've never had a problem with Verizon, though. In fact my experience has been modestly positive. Their cell coverage is good and consistent (no unwanted apps on my iPhone). When I lived back East, we were quite happy Verizon FIOS came to our neighborhood and gave us a superior alternative to Comcast. Are they behaving like Comcast in other areas without alternative internet providers?
With Verizon I've heard plenty of stories from friends of lock-in, specious fees, horrible customer service. All the fun stuff you hear from pretty much all the big players. Of course I'm talking strictly mobile service, which T-Mobile delivers adequately enough for me and has for the past five years. Phone service has been very word-of-mouth in my experience, and my friends with Verizon have scared me off of them for a long time. On the flipside T-Mobile did well at winning over a lot of folks I know.
combination of factors. atrocious customer service is a major one. failure to bring FIOS to market at the scale promised to local municipalities is another big issue. generally bad pricing where they extract extra fees from you for absurd reasons is another (not that they're alone in that bad practice).
It's saying something that despite having experienced their network coverage, and it is simply better than anyone else I've tried, I will never use Verizon again. Their service is that bad. In my case, it all started when a family member on our plan had her phone stolen a month before our hardware refresh date. I called them up to find out what could be done. Since it was an iPhone, they said I could only buy a new one at full price since Apple wouldn't let them do early upgrades. My suggestion (pay the ETF) was something they'd apparently never heard of, thought of or had any mechanism in place to handle. After several calls and getting passed around for a bit, one of their representatives had an idea. If I added a new line, swapped the number for a month I could then call in and have the contract switched over once the line no longer had an ETF. My only cost would be $40 for the extra unused line that month. That sounded reasonable...reasonable enough that I asked whether I could do it for all of the lines on my plan to keep the hardware refresh dates in sync. They said no problem. Fast forward one month, I call in to have the contracts transferred over. Their response, "we don't do that anymore." The best they could do was put what was now 3 unused lines on hold so I wasn't paying for them each month, but that would freeze the hardware refresh date/ETFs at the full 2 years. And even that could only be done for 3 months. I must have called them 20 times over the six months I tried to get the issue resolved and I spoke to countless supervisors. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find, which I told them many times was my option of last resort, was to switch to another carrier who would pay my ETFs. Their support couldn't make it happen.
The whole ordeal cost me somewhere between $500-$1k. I'm now with a different carrier with an inferior network. I've missed a few calls on occasion and had some drop from time to time. But their support is friendly and able to solve problems. So I'm happy. I also know I'm not alone. In searching the internet for how to resolve these problems with Verizon, you see there are large numbers of customers like me who are subjected to their byzantine billing system and end up being given an endless runaround.
They were very politely apologetic about not being able to do anything...
For me it goes back to when they'd disable some Bluetooth functionality on the phones they sold (and you had to buy their phones to use them on the Verizon network) so that they could sell you more services. Transfer those photos off your phone? The Verizon Photos Transfer Service will be an additional $5/month. People with, for example, the exact same phone only with an "AT&T" logo had the full functionality. And other stuff that I've forgotten.
That was such a blatant example of rent seeking that I've been content to do without Verizon's services since.
The kicker? They charge for those messages like SMS messages.
Their phones didn't use J2ME apps, only the proprietary Qualcomm BREW, and apps could only come from their own app store (Get It Now). On WinMo/BlackBerry smartphones with GPS, only Verizon's own $5/month map/navigation app could use the GPS hardware. The list went on and on
It actually kind of made me want to watch it, since it had him and several other people I know from their appearances on that and other podcasts.
I don't really care about what LeBron James has for lunch. And if I want to know what goes on behind the scenes in the NBA, I'm much more likely to watch a high quality professional production like the Toronto Raptor's "Open Gym" series that's freely available on YouTube.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I haven't been sold on what makes go90 worthwhile, and from the looks of it I'm not alone.
Google "go90 ads" and you'll see what I mean. Bright colors and slogans like "To watch, cut & share all the awesome" and "Brace yourself, entertainment is coming" which mean, effectively, nothing.
("Ooh, I love entertainment. Along with content it's one of my favorite things to experience.")
Also, "go90" is a terrible name.
The ads were problematic in the sense that they were essentially context-free, and while "us millennials" are enticed by shows we want to stream, we're also very cautious and skeptical of heavily advertised services at a late hour.
In me, the garish palette of the ads and the name evoked MTV-style advertising of the mid-1990s, when I was much younger, and bombarded with sketchy ads for polyphonic ringtones, J2ME games, and other services for brick cellphones on late-night television: an association that made me more wary than anything else, especially since the offered content appeared decidedly second-tier.
I think it's supposed to be 1337-5p34k. (Still terrible).
> "We all had to act like we were all leaving," one former contractor said. "They asked us not to say anything."
Sounds like someone very inexperienced calling the shots. Also asleep at the wheel. I really don't think version 3.0 is going to solve the root problems with this project.
Instead of a making it a Verizon thing, it should have been a separate entity owned by Verizon but not visibly associated with it. Make a faux-startup thing, with a separate app name which skips every other vowel and such and start from there.
I distrust and dislike Verizon. Had their pricey FIOS service for a year and despite having a high bandwidth they kept throttling Youtube videos. So I switched to a regular cable provide, pays half as much, have less advertised bandwidth but much better experience. Their billing was a mess. They took a deposit initially to avoid running a credit check on me with the idea of returning it back. It was a pain to get that deposit back. Now they are sending a salesperson to my door every 3 or 4 months with "special deals" trying to convince me to go back to them (since they already installed their on-premises equipment).
They weren't directly throttling things, they just let their peering connections max out until things broke.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/veriz...
> He said he believes that Verizon's decision to limit Netflix bandwidth is due to Verizon wanting customers to use its own streaming video services, such as Redbox Instant.
I'm not sure if anything has really changed in 4 years.
As a Generation X-er I remember that as a betrayal, when a few years later the 60+ Sumner Redstone decided that we couldn't watch music videos anymore, MTV stopped showing music videos and became yet another whistlestop in a vast wasteland of reality television.
I've noticed it's the same kind of show (mostly): someone lives in a harsh environment or otherwise away from civilization.
I think they're...living vicariously through it? They love the outdoors, hunting and fishing, etc. They are a bit too old and tired day-to-day to go and do the things they always have loved, but they get something out of watching others brave the elements.
Edit: yep, "US only", two years after launching... we're one of the best consumers of Netflix like services because of silly licensing deals. Netflix made a big deal about launching their streaming service in Canada and did it promptly.
There isn't room for another general purpose video platform icon on someone's home screen. That's not a great strategy.
It was a mistake to not find the niche like live sports from the very beginning and building the campaign/strategy around that. Then drive that wedge open.