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John Legere, T-Mobile’s CEO, doing what he does best – looking excentric
STATES CHRONICLE – T-Mobile has been the subjects of some minor controversies for a few weeks now, perhaps even going on a month. With their Binge On service, they managed to simultaneously anger multiple parties, as well as to satisfy their customers. Without any regard for the consequences, the company angers parties even further, as Binge On reaches 40 content providers courtesy of T-Mobile.
New content providers include four major streaming services – Amazon Video, Fox News, Univision Now, and the WWE Network.
This brings the total number of Binge On content providers to 40, to their benefit, and to the detriment of pretty much every other content provider.
The Binge On service is one of the best and clearest examples of controversial moves from major companies seen recently.
As data providers, the company decided to launch Binge ON, which allows users to watch large quantities of videos on their phones, without creating a huge hole in their data plan.
However, this comes with two downsides, each of them intensely argued against by various parties.
The first downside, not as relevant to this article, is that in order to provide the large quantities of videos, the company chose to forcefully reduce the quality of the videos provided by their content providers.
Some parties didn’t agree with this, as they provide their videos at a certain quality, and forcefully decreasing their quality isn’t really that ethically or business-wise right.
But this is far from the most controversial part, as that lies within the list of content providers.
By allowing their customers to watch content from only 40 providers while still keeping a decent data plan management, T-Mobile is interfering with net neutrality and is practically steering away clients from non-competitors.
Not only has the company seen a 79% increase in the number of daily viewers, but it has also seen a 33% increase in the number of hours of content watched every day thanks to Binge On.
And this increase in viewership for the Binge On content providers is towards the detriment of their competitors, which now find themselves cut out from a huge percentage of their previous viewers – T-Mobile users.
Despite the fact that most customers are satisfied with the deal, net neutrality advocacy groups, as well as other customers pressured T-Mobile into allowing people not to apt for the service, or simply to turn it off, feature which was not available before.
Image source: Wikimedia
