With T-Mobile President/CEO Mike Sievert gushing with confidence and a big trade marketing budget in play, TVision was designed to change pay TV for good.
It failed to catch on with consumers. But, one Wall Street feels Sievert’s plan worked — to the long-term detriment of MVPDs.
As RBR+TVBR first reported on March 30, T-Mobile abruptly abandoned the heavily promoted TVision vMVPD service by handing that segment of the wireless carrier’s business to Alphabet Inc., parent of Google and YouTube.
This means YouTube TV is now T-Mobile’s premium live TV solution, and an April 29 end of service date for TVision has been put in place.
It is now known that the demise of TVision came as a bit of a relief for Vijay Jayant, an analyst with Evercore ISI. As Seeking Alpha notes, T-Mobile was taking on “a number of headaches in a sector that’s just trying to hold together in a pay television market that’s in decline.”
Evercore has long skeptical of any rationale for a wireless carrier to offer its own virtual MVPDs. Jayant says, “While we would have preferred that [T-Mobile] not pursue this route in the first place, we see it as an incremental positive that the company is no longer dedicating incremental resources to an in-house video offering.”
Then there is the assessment of TVision’s demise from Alan Wolk, the co-founder and lead analyst of New Jersey-based TVREV. He believes linear pay TV could experience a faster decline than forecast, using TVision’s failure as the basis for his rationale. Why? TVision didn’t catch on with consumers because another vMVPD or MVPD, regardless of the distinction, isn’t needed in today’s marketplace — even with a gradual 5G rollout and the issues surrounding key T-Mobile-supported entity MobiTV.
