Verizon Focused on Digital Distribution Rights, Not Owning Content CFO Says 18 hours 23 min ago by Bevin Fletcher
As Verizon looks to continue integrating its platforms under its Oath media unit, the company will focus investment on digital distribution rights, rather than follow the growing trend of owning content.
The company feels that being a distributor of content, rather than an underlying owner, is the right move at this time, Verizon CFO Matt Ellis said Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference.
Ellis said that integration of the company’s Oath properties, which house Yahoo and AOL, is going well and now the focus is bringing one unified set of platforms to consumers and advertisers. This falls in line with comments made earlier this month by Oath’s CEO Tim Armstrong that Verizon’s mobile video platform Go90 would be folded into the media unit with its content distributed among the company’s other outlets.
With a large consumer base already interacting with the brands regularly, Ellis said, “now the question is, how do you deepen that relationship with consumers?”
He said Verizon is now focused on increasing the number of minutes every day that users are interacting with the platform. He pointed to the five-year mobile streaming deal signed with the NFL last year as an example of content that brings consumers into their platforms and said they then have complimentary content that keeps them there.
When it comes to mobile video offerings Ellis said that while Verizon continues to look at the OTT space, there are no updates at this time, but the company is open to finding a way to deliver a video offering that matters to mobile customers.
While Verizon is one of the only main carriers that doesn’t have a video offering bundled with wireless, Ellis noted that Verizon also has the lowest churn, saying that ultimately customers value strong network performance, and without that the value of those offerings is not as robust.
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