Verizon is on a roll…

Verizon is getting aggressive in growing its IoT business. Verizon’s first foray in IoT was in Smart Home when they launched a service around the solution from 4Home (acquired by Motorola, my guess is that the acquisition was influenced by Verizon?). It was a DIY service unlike its peers who had launched managed services (Comcast, AT&T, Cox, ADT), and IMO it was dead on arrival. It limped along for 4 years and finally shut down.

Verizon’s strategy also seemed uncertain when they acquired Hughes Telematics back in June of 2012. Hughes Telematics is based in Atlanta – and I have only heard of anecdotes and rumors of that division constantly losing people or being laid off since 2012. It felt that their Connected Car strategy was falling apart.

However recent events point to a different story – they are getting serious about this space. They have announced two back to back acquisitions. First with Telogis in June of this year and it was followed by Fleetmatics in August. Verizon certainly has heft between the three acquisitions in the Connected Car & Telematics space.

And to keep the momentum rolling – Verizon announced that it is acquiring Sensity Systems, a Smart City startup last week.

The question though is does it have the internal organizational strength and discipline to make the most of all of these acquisitions. Remember that they have also announced that they are acquiring Yahoo!

List of all the VZ Acquisitions as compiled by Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/verizon/acquisitions

 

Here is list of analysis on the acquisitions worth reading:

CRN on the the reaction of VZ Partners

CRN on the Sensity acquisition

TechRepublic on the Sensity acquisition

 

 

 

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Delivering TV over Web

TV coming as a service over Broadband/Internet… everybody is rolling up their sleeves and getting ready. Biggest hurdle – negotiating content license with Content Creators & Publishers.

Amplify’d from adage.com

A group of deep-pocketed companies, including Microsoft and Verizon, are exploring delivering TV service over the web, a move that could disrupt the economics of cable TV and lead to a new generation of “virtual” cable companies that provide TV without owning the pipe into the home.

Neither is close to rolling out their own web TV service, but both are determined to secure the rights so that they have the option of doing so in the future. They’re not alone: Cable operators are looking at web delivery to leap the confines of their wired network, and video-on-demand services such as Hulu, Apple and Amazon, as well as other brands not generally associated with TV, are looking to enter the TV market.

The notion of an “over-the-top” video service that bypasses cable and satellite networks has been around for a long time but generally has been held back by two main factors: programmers’ reluctant to license new players and cable, telco and satellite operators’ control over the access to the home. They’ve also been held back by the limitations of the web itself: The infrastructure just isn’t there to support as many live simultaneous streams of content as a popular live event like, say, the Super Bowl would create.

“Somebody is going to pull the trigger this year. It may not be 250 channels in HD, but it will be at a minimum a good handful of channels with subscription on-demand and the ability to get the content on lots of devices,” said Braxton Jarratt, CEO of Clear Leap, which also provides enabling technology for web-delivered TV. Read more at adage.com

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