In its efforts to capture home internet service marketshare from major cable companies, T-Mobile US is scaling up LTE- and 5G-backed fixed wireless access. To make that service more appealing, the carrier figured it also needed a streaming TV service and, as such, launched TVision in late October.
Upon launch, CEO Mike Sievert said cable companies “[hold]TV fans hostage, bundling live news and sports into expensive packages with hundreds of other channels that people don’t want, and don’t watch. People are ready for real choice and real change in home TV, maybe this year more than ever before.” Thus, Tvision.
Now, according to a company blog post published by Sievert on March 29, “Turns out, TV is better with friends.” What that means is TVision is now going to use YouTube TV as its “premium live TV service” and Philo will serve as the “new base live TV service.”
“This shift may surprise some given last year’s TVision streaming services launch,” Sievert wrote. “But innovation seldom follows a straight line. Since launching the TVision initiative, we’ve learned a lot about the TV industry, about streaming products, and of course, about TV customers.”
Although not specifically noted in the blog post, part of those learnings about the TV industry and streaming products likely related to reported packaging pushback from the likes of Discovery, NBC and CBS.
TVision in its current form is winding down at the end of April. Pricing and packages for the updated service are at the bottom of the above-linked blog post.
The TV service will still operate with FWA customers using a cellular/Wi-Fi gateway device to connect the TVision HUB HDMI plug-in device.
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