Cord cutters’ unlikely new ally: Verizon?

Verizon has famously gotten into multiple spats with Netflix but the telecom giant might soon find itself in the middle of peering disputes of its own with incumbent ISPs.Deadline Hollywood reports that Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said on Thursday that his company is working to get an Internet pay television service up and running sometime in 2015 that will include the four major TV networks plus other “custom channels.” The big news, however, is that McAdam also made arguments about the future of TV that will make bundle-loving cable executives’ hearts seize.

“No one wants to have 300 channels on your wireless,” he explained. “Everyone understands it will go to a la carte. The question is what does that transition look like.”

Furthermore, McAdam suggested that any companies that try to cling to the antiquated bundle model are “the ones who will be left behind.”

While McAdam is certainly talking a good game here, we’ll definitely have to wait to see if what his company is offering is really something that will appeal to cord cutters or if it’s just more of the same overpriced pay TV package that we’ve long grown disenchanted with.

Also intriguing are McAdams’ comments on having “300 channels on your wireless” — is he suggesting that Verizon subscribers will be able to watch this service on their LTE connections without it counting against their data caps? Because if he is, that would obviously be hugely problematic in terms of network neutrality since it would automatically put rival Internet TV services at a major disadvantage if their streams still counted against users’ caps on Verizon’s network.