go90

» see go90.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

go90 was verizon's idea of a millennial-targeted, mobile-first video service. it launched on october 1 2015. the name was meant to reference the gesture of turning your phone sideways into landscape to watch a video. on android and ios the app served a mix of original short series, licensed content from acquired streaming startups, plus some live sports. the entire pitch lived inside the bet that young people would prefer watching video inside a carrier-branded app rather than youtube.

verizon spent extravagantly to make this work. the company bought vessel, the jason kilar premium-video startup, in 2016. it absorbed assets from intel's oncue tv-streaming project. total invested capital across the program reached roughly $1.2 billion by 2018. the audience never followed. internal numbers leaked to the press across the run showed monthly user counts in the low millions at best, well below the projections that justified the spend. verizon shut go90 down on july 31 2018 and quietly folded what content it could into oath properties, the holding entity for aol and yahoo.

go90 was us-only at the carrier layer. verizon's network does not exist outside the united states. the app was never going to ship to turkey because the whole product was tied to a specific phone bill in a specific country. i watched the launch through tech-press coverage and the eventual obituaries through tech-press coverage. the actual app was a closed window i could not have opened from ankara even if i had wanted to.

~ the case file ~

~ the pitch ~

verizon's strategic premise was that the company owned the pipe and therefore could push content through the pipe with a cost advantage. zero-rated streaming on verizon plans, plus a programming budget bankrolled by acquisitions instead of organic show development, plus exclusive deals with nfl content. the bet was that audiences would arrive because the cost of entry was lower than youtube tv or netflix. they did not arrive.

the verge's coverage at the time noted that go90 had no clear product identity. it was a mobile app, but it was also a tv service. it had original shows, but no franchise hits. it had nfl content, but only in clips. the carrier-bundled angle never produced a recognizable cultural footprint. when the verge published the obituary in june 2018, the most common reaction online was a version of "wait, that was still running."

~ what really happened ~

verizon announced the shutdown on june 29 2018. the final date was july 31. the company said in the announcement that it would shift the original series catalog to other verizon properties. some of it ended up on aol and yahoo for a while. most of it disappeared. the vessel staff had already been laid off. the oncue assets had already been digested. by the end of 2018 the only remaining sign that go90 had existed was a $1.2 billion line item in the verizon strategic-review documents.

quibi tried the same gestalt in 2020 with a different go-to-market and roughly the same outcome. mobile-first short-premium video for the demographic that already had youtube and tiktok was not actually a product gap. it was a deck slide. verizon found that out first. quibi paid to learn it again two years later.

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