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T-Mobile is planning to offer its subscribers Google’s YouTube TV online package of cable channels starting at $55 per month, a $10 discount from the service’s standard price.
The offer, which starts April 6, will be available to all T-Mobile postpaid, or regular monthly, wireless customers.
YouTube TV includes more than 85 cable channels, such as CNN, ESPN, and TBS, as well as local broadcast stations in most cities.
T-Mobile customers who want a less premium package can pay $10 per month for Philo TV, also a $10 discount. That service includes over 60 channels, but focuses on more basic fare such as AMC, Lifetime, and Nickelodeon.
The offers were accompanied by the announcement that T-Mobile was shutting down its own somewhat similar online cable TV offering known as TVision. The carrier debuted TVision packages costing $40 to $60 monthly last year. But managing relationships with the big entertainment companies that supply the channels proved no easy task, with some claiming T-Mobile was in violation of contracts for how it included and excluded channels from its TVision packages.
“This shift may surprise some given last year’s TVision streaming services launch,” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said in a blog post. “But innovation seldom follows a straight line.”
The software provider T-Mobile relied on for its TV software encountered “financial challenges,” Sievert said, while customers weren’t served by the fragmentation of competing online cable packages in the market, he said. YouTube TV offers more then twice as many channels as TVision’s entry offering and YouTube TV is available on more set top boxes, such as those from Roku, he noted.
T-Mobile’s latest strategy is closer to that of rival Verizon, which simply offers its customers YouTube TV billed through their wireless accounts, though at the regular price of $65 per month. AT&T, which paid $109 billion including debt for entertainment giant Time Warner, pitches its wireless customers its AT&T TV service, which starts at $60 monthly for 65 channels.
T-Mobile also announced several other links with Google services for its customers, including making Google’s Messages app the default messaging app on Android phones it sells and offering Google’s Google One cloud storage service as a backup for phones.
