Verizon closes its original video application Go90

Verizon closes its original Go90 video application on July 31, according to a report by Variety . The application gets its name from the process of transforming a smartphone from the vertical orientation into a horizontal motion, presumably to watch longer video content like TV shows and live sports that Verizon hoped to make attractive to the younger ones.

Go90 offered a mix of original short videos in the vein of webseries, sports and licensed programming from official networks, all for free. The goal was to subsidize the application with costly advertising, with the hope that marketers would be eager to reach this lucrative Snapchat magnet demographic.

This vision never really worked for Verizon. Go90, which was launched in 2015, has suffered from a silly name and anemic viewing rate at all levels, and none of its original video shows have ever really been successful . (Although a Go90-funded film, the animated short of Kobe Bryant Dear Basketball won an Oscar.) In 2016, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam admits that the Go90 platform "has been a little outclassed. " Digiday Verizon reports spent more than $ 1.2 billion on the project.

According to Variety the Go90 team and its operations were folded into Oath, the new multimedia unit resulting from the combination of AOL and Yahoo that Verizon obtained by acquiring key Yahoo's strengths. "Following the creation of Oath, Go90 will be abandoned," said a spokesman for Verizon Variety in a statement. "Verizon will focus on the large-scale construction of its first digital brands in sports, finance, news and entertainment for mobile consumers and the 5G applications of tomorrow."

As to what will happen to Verizon for the Go90 platform, Digiday reports that Go90 will return the broadcast and content rights to the original production owners, including partners such as Vice Media, Complex Networks and AwesomenessTV. (For full disclosure, Verge's parent company Vox Media was a Go90 partner, helping to produce a program for our sports website SBNation. Verizon plans to continue to distribute the original video through his oath properties, with a focus on sports rights with the NFL and the NBA.