It seems that Verizon has every intention of shouldering even more channels on its FiOS TV service, but they only want to fork out money for what their customers are watching at that point in time. According to the good people over at The Wall Street Journal, Verizon intends to pay the individual channels based on the number of “unique views” in a span of five minutes or higher that they rack up on a monthly basis, as compared to the mandatory monthly fees that each subscriber forks out with the current business model. Apart from that, Verizon intends to make full use of their very own set-top box data instead of Nielsen ratings in order to calculate the views.
Do you smell a rat here? We cannot blame Verizon for realizing that there are benefits associated with paying for TV based on an a la carte premise, as that could very well be what we would be doing if we were in Verizon’s shoes. According to Verizon’s chief programming negotiator Terry Denson, he informed The wall Street Journal that Verizon is currently negotiating with “midtier and smaller” media companies, and although negotiations have seen some progress, there is opposition to this rather disruptive model. What do you think of Verizon’s move – are you in support of it or not?
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