Verizon is thinking about striking partnerships with carriers in other markets to take its new mobile video service Go90 beyond the U.S., said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong at Recode’s Code/Mobile conference in Halfmoon Bay, Calif. Wednesday.
“We want to be the largest mobile media technology company,” Armstrong said. This would involve going off the network, and possibly also striking partnerships with carriers in other markets. One option would be to white-label services like Go90 in other countries, he said.
Armstrong is overseeing Go90 and other content businesses at Verizon ever since the telco acquired AOL for $4.4 billion in May. Asked about how the deal came together, Armstrong said that AOL was looking to raise up to $2 billion to acquire additional companies. One option the company considered was spinning off Huffington Post, or finding a significant investor for the website, in order to raise some of the money.
But in the end, Verizon’s offer was hard to refuse — in part because the company brought a lot of technology and infrastructure needed for the delivery of video to the table. “They had assets that fit really well with our assets,” Armstrong said.
So what is Armstrong working on now? “We are really interested in mobile video,” he said, adding that 60 percent of AOL’s traffic already comes from mobile, and that video is playing an ever-growing role. Said Armstrong: “Video is gonna be enormous.”
