Verizon Has Flipped for Video

It’s counting on its new Go90 service to pull in ad revenue.

Skrillex performs at the Go90 Live Concert Series Celebrating Super Bowl 50 at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco on Feb. 6.
Photographer: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Verizon

Provide news feedback or report an error

Confidential tip?

Send a tip to our reporters

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

By Scott Moritz and Lucas Shaw

February 18, 2016 at 7:08 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the February 22, 2016 issue of businessweek.

Verizon Communications once aspired to be the Comcast of mobile, streaming movies and TV shows to its 107 million monthly subscribers. Now it wants to be YouTube, feeding short video clips to millennials, who spend more hours each day glued to the tiny screens of their phones than they spend sitting in front of a TV.

America’s largest mobile carrier has reached a key juncture. Its wireless revenue tripled in the past decade, but growth has slowed as just about everyone in the U.S. now has a cell phone. That’s why Verizon is eager to stake its claim in the nascent market for mobile video. More than 139 million Americans watched video on a smartphone at least once a month in 2015, a number that’s expected to jump 22 percent, to 169 million, by 2018, according to estimates by researcher EMarketer.