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Viacom reveals some channels coming to T-Mobile's streaming service this year
- Media company Viacom announced a new partnership with T-Mobile.
- Viacom announced that its TV channels — including MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, and more — will come to T-Mobile’s streaming service.
- The streaming service was supposed to launch last year, but it looks like it’s coming this year instead.
Viacom pushed out a press release today to announce a new partnership with the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier T-Mobile. As part of the partnership, Viacom revealed some channels that will come to T-Mobile’s still-unreleased media streaming service.
Viacom-owned channels that will hit the service include MTV, BET, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and most sub-channels of those brands (MTV2, TeenNick, etc.). Viacom also owns the Paramount Network which hosts shows like Lip Sync Battle, COPS, and the show Heathers, based on the cult 1980s film of the same name.
T-Mobile’s media streaming service was scheduled to launch last year but was delayed for unknown reasons. The Viacom press release explicitly states that the company “will play a key role in T-Mobile’s delivery of compelling new mobile video services to consumers later this year,” which suggests that we won’t have to wait much longer for the service to land.
T-Mobile’s outspoken CEO John Legere had this to say about the upcoming service: “TV programming has never been better, but consumers are fed up with rising costs, hidden fees, lousy customer service, non-stop BS. And MacGyvering together a bunch of subscriptions, apps, and dongles isn’t much better. That’s why T-Mobile is on a mission to give consumers a better way to watch what they want when they want.”
Despite Legere’s strong talk, we still are not quite sure what T-Mobile’s unnamed streaming service will be. The fact that Viacom is on board suggests it will not be a Netflix-style service; it’s more likely to be a cord-cutting cable replacement, akin to YouTube TV. It’s possible that T-Mobile’s service will be like YouTube TV but offer each channel individually, rather than bundling everything together (YouTube TV currently costs $40 per month).
Whatever the streaming service ends up being, it will put T-Mobile in a competitive position as Verizon’s media streaming attempts haven’t worked out and AT&T’s DirectTV service is bleeding subscribers.
We’ll have to wait until later this year to find out exactly what T-Mobile has in store for us.