Google Fiber TV

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

~ the obit ~

Google Fiber TV was the kind of product a few thousand American households in specific zip codes could buy, and i have never lived in one of those zip codes. it was cable television, sold by Google, over Google's own fiber, in Kansas City and then a short list of other cities. from Ankara this was always a story about someone else's infrastructure.

it launched on 24 July 2012 with the first Google Fiber build in Kansas City. a gigabit connection and nearly two hundred channels for a hundred and twenty dollars a month, or seventy for the internet on its own. you got a set-top box and a DVR that could record eight programs at the same time. the detail everybody repeated was the remote control. Google gave you a Nexus 7 tablet and that was how you drove the television.

the strange thing about it was always the premise. Google spent the 2010s explaining that the cable bundle was a dying arrangement, and then sold the cable bundle, because in 2012 you could not persuade an American household to pay for a fast line without television attached to it. Fiber TV existed to make the internet product sellable. it was never the point of the exercise.

what it ran into is the thing that has killed every small television distributor. carriage fees are priced by scale. a company with twenty million subscribers pays less per subscriber than a company with fifty thousand, and Fiber TV never got past a hundred thousand by anyone's estimate. Google's size does not help here. the negotiation is with the channel owners, and they were counting Fiber's subscribers rather than Google's market cap.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you actually got ~

the hardware was better than the cable boxes it was competing with, which was not a high bar in 2012 but was still noticeable. the network storage box sat somewhere in the house, the TV boxes talked to it, and the DVR recording limit was high enough that people stopped thinking about it. the guide was fast. rented cable boxes of that era mostly were not.

the Nexus 7 remote is the part that dates it hardest. handing every subscriber a full Android tablet to change channels with was an expensive way of saying that the future of the remote control was a touchscreen. that turned out to be wrong in a specific way. the touchscreen won, but it was the phone people already owned, and nobody needed a second one taped to the arm of the sofa.

~ the day it stopped being sold ~

on 4 February 2020 Google Fiber put up a post saying that as of that day it would no longer offer a linear TV product to new customers. the wording was that the best TV was already online. new subscribers were sent to YouTube TV, which Google owned, or to fuboTV, which had just signed on as a partner.

what it did not do was switch anything off. existing Fiber TV subscribers kept the service, and Google then spent two years walking them out of it market by market, handing each household a Chromecast with Google TV on the way. Nashville and Huntsville went first. the Carolinas and Irvine were finished around September 2021 and Austin and Atlanta near the end of that November. Kansas City, where the whole thing started, was among the last to be given a date.

~ the long tail ~

the Google support page for it now reads "Fiber TV has retired", which is a tidy sentence for a product that took two years to finish dying. Google Fiber itself is still there, still selling internet in a modest number of cities. the television part is the piece that got amputated.

the honest reading is that Fiber TV did its job and the job ended. it existed to make a gigabit line saleable to households that could not imagine buying internet without channels, and by 2020 those households had stopped existing in enough numbers to matter. YouTube TV now sells the same bundle for more money than the Fiber package cost, over somebody else's wire. anyway, that is the trade everyone made.

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