Google Fiber is throwing in towel on video service. In a blog post, the company announced that it won’t be offering a cable-like lineup of television channels along with gigabit Internet service in Louisville and San Antonio…
We’re trying something new in our next two Fiber cities. When we begin serving customers in Louisville and San Antonio, we’ll focus on providing superfast Internet – and the endless content possibilities that creates – without the traditional TV add on.
If you’ve been reading the business news lately, you know that more and more people are moving away from traditional methods of viewing television content. Customers today want to control what, where, when, and how they get content. They want to do it their way, and we want to help them.
Two years ago, a top Google Fiber executive, Milo Medin, said “if you don’t offer a good TV service your ability to compete with incumbents that bundle Internet and TV together is significantly impaired”.
So, what changed? A couple of things.
It’s certainly true that the availability of unbundled video content available directly via the Internet has grown considerably in the past two years, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. Declaring linear video subscriptions to be a legacy business and letting cable and satellite companies wrestle over its (slowly) dwindling remains simplifies Google Fiber’s operations and business model, and eliminates a lot of headaches. That alone could be a good trade for the potential subscribers they might lose as a result.
But something else changed, too. In the past two years, Google Fiber has become, in effect, Google Fiber and Wireless. Technically, it’s easy to add a hundred or two TV channels to a fiber-based service, but impossible on a terrestrial wireless system that has orders of magnitude less total bandwidth available. Google’s announcement should also be treated as another indicator that in the future the company is going to be even more selective about where it builds fiber to the home infrastructure. If it even installs any more fiber at all.