Verizon V CAST

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

~ the last words ~

v cast was us-only at the carrier layer. verizon wireless owned the network and the customer, and shipped a closed portal you reached by hitting a button on your feature phone. i was in turkey on turkcell and avea. i never touched it. the local equivalents were the carrier-branded mobile content storefronts that nobody really loved either.

verizon launched v cast on february 1 2005 as the first nationwide 3g video service in the us. it ran on the ev-do build of cdma2000. early devices shipped with a v cast button on the keypad that took you directly to verizon's catalog of news clips and music videos. by january 2006 verizon added v cast music, a paid mobile download service for songs that came with a dual-format model so you also got a copy for your pc. the whole thing presumed the carrier would tell you what you wanted to watch.

the iphone showed up in june 2007 and the model started to wobble. the iphone shipped without a v cast button, without any carrier-portal button at all, just a browser. android arrived in 2008 with another browser plus an app store, and the carrier-portal frame got smaller every year after that.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

v cast cost extra. fifteen dollars a month on top of your voice plan got you the video service in the early years. music tracks cost a dollar fifty for the dual-format download or ninety nine cents for the phone-only version. the catalog was a verizon-curated set of partnerships with mtv and cbs sports, with content licensed to play in a custom player tuned for the ev-do bandwidth window. it worked. it just kept feeling like watching tv through a soda straw.

~ the fall ~

two things broke the v cast model. first the smartphone replaced the feature phone, so the dedicated portal button on the keypad went away. second the unlimited data plan made the carrier's content licensing arrangement pointless. you could already get netflix and youtube on the phone through their own apps. why would you pay verizon another fifteen dollars to watch a curated sports clip in a sandboxed player.

verizon shut v cast music down in march 2011 and replaced it with the verizon media store, a cleaner storefront for direct mp3 buys. the video side held on for another year and a half. on december 15 2012 verizon turned off v cast videos. by then verizon was investing in viewdini and the streaming-aggregator pivot. the closed portal era was over.

~ the long tail ~

v cast was a us-only product on a us-only network technology. nothing about cdma ev-do made it relevant for the gsm world i was in, so for me the whole thing was a verizon press release in passing. the model itself was global. every major carrier ran some version of the closed mobile portal in the mid 2000s, and they all died within a few years of each other when smartphones made the carrier irrelevant for content.

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