Jeff Binder, who was the co-founder and CEO of Layer3 TV, which was acquired by T-Mobile in December 2017 for $325 Million has left the company. Since the acquisition, he had been spearheading T-Mobile’s Home and Entertainment group which will now see T-Mobile’s SVP Product Management, Robert Gary, take over his duties.
In April, T-Mobile relaunched Layer3 TV as TVision and brought it to 8 cities new cities — Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington DC metro areas, as well as Longmont CO. They view the product as a full cable replacement, without some of the headaches like contracts, early termination fees, or hidden broadcast fees. T-Mobile says that as long as you keep your plan, your price will stay the same.
The company has been gearing up to launch a mobile OTT service later this year. In early April, the company reached a deal with Viacom to bring their top channels like MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount Network to an upcoming mobile video service. While the exact channel line-up is unknown besides MTV, Comedy Central, and other Viacom channels — it sounds similar to the entertainment-focused skinny bundles by Philo or AT&T WatchTV.
According to T-Mobile EVP and CTO Neville Ray:
“We’re going after broadband in a big way and people need an integrated TV product in that space. So we’re moving down that path and you’ll see more working in concert with broadband. And then mobile and we think there’s a lot of room in mobile in the OTT space, fall through partnerships and through first party offers from us.”
Mike Sievert, T-Mobile COO and President, who will be overseeing the company’s television and home broadband efforts said, “Are we going to augment that with TV offers that range from full line cable TV replacement, some more disruptive lower price offers? Absolutely, we’re going to do that.”