Verizon at Home

[#1]

On Wednesday, Verizon launched our Widget Bazaar applications store and said Internet Video on FiOS TV would be available soon. I’m happy to report that today, Internet Video and a new My Videos feature are now available for all FiOS TV Home Media DVR customers, free of charge.

With Internet Video, customers can search and view user-generated online videos from blip.tv, Dailymotion and Veoh. Our Home Media DVR subscribers can also search sites individually or all at once, using either keywords or by selecting "most watched," "top rated," and "recent searches" categories.

The new My Videos feature allows subscribers to view personal videos stored on their home PCs and watch them on their FiOS TV.

Check out these free, innovative features.

[#2]

There have been a few questions  about why we didn't make it easier to post comments on the FiOS TV Widgets for Facebook and Twitter.  Frankly, the task of entering text via a remote control is a little cumersome, and our test group didn't think it was worth the trouble.  Particularly for Twitter, adding your own Tweets via cell phone seemed to be the perferred way to go.  In both cases, we designed the apps to be an enhancement to the TV watching experience and to let you see material posted by you or others.  It's great to see a lot of people are already having fun with these new additions.  -- Eric

[#3]

Not available in Southern California yet.  Widget Bazaar has only fantasy football, sokou, twitter and facebook as of 7-18.

[#4]

Correction--available not as a widget, but through media manager via menu.  Need to update the software on your computer, but then works great..Thanks, Verizon!!!

[#5]

Although a welcome addition, Verizon's Internet Video is truly a weak product (at this stage).  It only supports ONE truly mainstream internet video provider, YouTube.  The others mentioned (blip.tv, Dailymotion and Veoh) are really niche sites, with not a lot of interest for the casual user. 

How about adding Hulu, NBC and other network sites to this capability, if you want your customers to have a real benefit from this.  Otherwise, it will just be a novelty that failed to achieve something that was clearly within its capability.

[#6]

CapnTrips,

Yeah, you’re right, we don’t have YouTube as part of the Internet video offer at this point. As you can imagine, individual deals have to be struck with each Internet video provider before we can turn their particular service on for FiOS customers. However, you should check out the content on the sites we do have deals with – there is a lot to see there.

On your Hulu question, of course, some of the most-watched content that Hulu offers is already available on FiOS TV for free on demand. We have more than 15,000 VoD titles and a pretty good search tool that lets you find specific programs easily.

As a strategy, we believe that our subscribers are best served by providing this content on VoD rather than using an on-line service. That way we can offer the best quality
picture and sound. Already we have many programs from the major networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – available on FiOS TV On Demand now. This is an area we want to expand, and you’ll see us continue to do so.

I’ll have more to say on this in a forthcoming post to the blog. -- Eric

[#7]

---

Eric_Rabe wrote:

As a strategy, we believe that our subscribers are best served by providing this content on VoD rather than using an on-line service. That way we can offer the best quality
picture and sound. Already we have many programs from the major networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – available on FiOS TV On Demand now. This is an area we want to expand, and you’ll see us continue to do so

---

I disagree.  VOD only offers limited content from those network shows.  Users want to be to view any segment, from any show, at any time.

Your strategy here is money driven, not subscribers' best interests.

I understand that by fully enabling hulu and tv.com, VOD for those networks would cease, thus FIOS losing out on extra revenue.  But soon enough, you will have to make that conversion as more and more people are connecting the internet to their TV, and thus watching those shows anyway, thus forcing them to reconsider even having a cable provider.

for example, I know someone that was able to connect their iphone to their tv to watch a show on tv.com.  In that case, that person did not have any verizon or internet services, just AT&T for their cell phone.

So if FIOS wants to remain competitive, then they will have to ask the networks to enable the "pause" and "rewind" features, as well as offer many more shows.