Verizon’s 3-year-old mobile streaming service go90 will be gone at the end of July.
A Verizon representative issued a statement on Thursday, which claims go90 is being axed in favor of Oath, the company’s new digital media organization that folded in Yahoo! and AOL.
Following the creation of Oath, Go90 will be discontinued. Verizon will focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news, and entertainment for today’s mobile consumers and tomorrow’s 5G applications.
In its close to three years of existence, Go90 put out an impressive lineup of shows ranging from sports-focused series to teen thrillers. More recently it was announced that the new series Like and Subscribe would land on go90 on July 9, after an influencers-only mural promoting the show made the internet mad. But the millennial-aimed service never quite found its sweet spot, even after Verizon bought a stake in AwesomenessTV and acquired content from Vice Media and New Form. A former employee told Business Insider that the company shelled out more than $200 million on programming and definitely “overpaid.” The platform also toed the line of parody at times; a 2015 report from the Verge stated: “Go90 wants users to form ‘crews,’ a painful attempt at using language that would resonate with the urban youth of Gen Z.”
According to the go90 website, the platform will shut down at midnight on July 30, and it directs people wondering where they will still be able to find go90 content to “Yahoo! Sports, HuffPost, and Tumblr.” Oath’s CEO Tim Armstrong foreshadowed go90’s demise in February but said its content would be distributed to Yahoo! and Verizon platforms. It’s still not clear where that content will end up.
H/T Variety