DENVER—Jeff Binder and his team have officially settled in and are flying the T-Mobile flag at full mast, nearly four months after the wireless company closed on its acquisition of his start-up pay TV company, Layer3 TV, and made him executive vice president of Home and Entertainment.
Just as his new boss, John Legere, did in December, when he announced T-Mobile's acquisition of Layer3, Binder used a fireside chat at The Pay TV Show in Denver to promise disruption. But questions remain about what the platform will look like.
“It will be sooner rather than later,” Binder said, promising that the new service will debut sometime this year.
Will it be mobile native? Virtual MVPD? We still don't know.
“We’re just looking to break up some of the old constructs of how cable companies do business with customers. TV is a very single-use focused device. TV needs to be more reflective of who we are as consumers,” Binder said.
RELATED: T-Mobile closes on Layer3 TV purchase
“Disruptive means listening to customers. It doesn’t necessarily mean blowing things up,” he added, in the one-on-one moderated by Mike Dano, editor in chief of FierceMarkets' Telecom Group.
Binder, whose Layer3 team was kept intact in its Denver headquarters, said you can visit that office today “and you won’t be able to tell the difference between it and any other T-Mobile office.”
Certainly, just more than 100 days in, Binder seems fully vested in T-Mobile’s “uncarrier” brand message.
Taking the stage, he asked Dano, tongue (somewhat) in cheek, “Can we get rid of the AT&T blue and get some magenta going?” referring to the stage lighting. “Otherwise, people are going to get overcharged, with exploding bundles. No one wants that.”
Perhaps less surprisingly, Binder did not—and could not—talk about T-Mobile’s pending merger with Sprint.