Verizon Communications has roughly 5 million subscribers to its FiOS TV service, and about 3.5 million of those are in markets where CBS owns a TV station. Now the company may be picking up some more subs, after reaching a new re-transmission deal with CBS while the broadcaster continues a standoff with Time Warner Cable. That fight has left Time Warner customers in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas without access to CBS stations since August 2.
“Verizon is a distribution partner of growing importance to us that provides excellent service to its expanding number of subscribers, and we are glad that this partnership will continue and grow,” said Terry Denson, VP of video content and strategy at Verizon. The two companies also noted that the deal was “reached in a very short period of time,” a clear reference to the lengthy Time Warner negotiations.
The companies said that the deal also calls for “dramatically increased” distribution of CBS Sports Network on Verizon’s FIOS TV. In the past, many FiOS customers have complained about not having access to CBS Sports Network. FiOS TV will also offer customers CBS programming via video-on-demand for no additional cost.
Verizon’s FiOS fiber optic service offers TV, phone and high-speed Internet in one package. This summer the company launched FiOS Quantum, offering Internet speeds of up to 500 megabits per second for $310 per month. The company curtailed expansion plans for FiOS when it struck a co-marketing deal with a group of cable companies last summer; it also may have realized that FiOS would not be able to compete effectively with Google Fiber’s promised speeds of 1 gigabit per second.
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