After scuttling plans to launch an OTT service and no longer investing in growth for its Prism TV IPTV platform, CenturyLink has openly declared that it’s willing to bundle third-party virtual pay TV services into residential broadband packages.
“We have linear programming partnerships where we sell and make sure that, if our customers want a video solution, that we have one to offer them. We'll do the same thing with over-the-top going forward,” said CenturyLink CEO Jeff Storey, during the company’s first quarter earnings call yesterday. (A transcript of the earnings call was provided by Seeking Alpha.)
“We have relationships with most of the over-the-top providers because they're big customers with our CDN networks,” Story added. “And so we'll continue to expand those relationships to make sure that we take to our consumer customers the products that they want, even if we don't necessarily provide them directly ourselves.”
After shuttering the beta test for its OTT service Stream last month, CenturyLink confirmed to Fierce last month that it will also no longer work to promote and grow its linear Prism TV product.
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“Last year, we announced we were deemphasizing our Prism TV service and have since made the decision to stop actively marketing it altogether,” Storey said. "In the first quarter, we also shut down our over-the-top video product.
“We strongly believe in over-the-top solutions, but also believe our role is to leverage our network capabilities to deliver other companies' content to consumers, not necessarily purchase that content and directly market it ourselves,” Storey added. “Whether utilizing our CDN services to distribute traffic globally for our large content customers or utilizing our high-speed IP services to deliver content directly to consumers, we will continue to play a valuable and profitable role in over-the-top.”