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Verizon to Offer Free Mobile TV, With an Eye on Millennials

Verizon Communications is hoping that millennials will start flipping their mobile phones 90 degrees and streaming live and on-demand television.

The telecommunications company plans to announce this week the start of a free, ad-supported mobile streaming service called Go90, a reference to the behavior of rotating a phone to watch videos in landscape mode. Aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds, the service will be available to all users, regardless of whether or not they are Verizon customers.

“Seventy percent of this group view on mobile first; that’s an enormous opportunity,” said Marni M. Walden, president of product innovation and new business at Verizon.

Executives made a conscious decision not to include the word Verizon when choosing a name for the new service, in part to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. That is important as Verizon seeks to bolster its mobile ad business and deliver to advertisers big audiences that watch premium content. Go90 also could serve as a marketing tool to attract new customers to Verizon’s wireless service.

The content for Go90 will be a mix of live events, prime-time television and original web series. Rather than the inventory of entire networks, included are popular shows from Comedy Central, Food Network, ESPN, NFL Network and Discovery, as well as popular online series from AwesomenessTV, Vice, Tastemade and Machinima.

Go90 will also feature National Football League games and live concerts. The service will start as a mobile-first product, but executives said they were thinking about creating streaming options that would work on traditional televisions as well.

“If you look at this generation, the first place they go to look for anything is not a network lineup or a channel lineup, it’s the web,” said Brian Angiolet, Verizon’s senior vice president for consumer products.

Content-rights negotiations typically are competitive battles. Mr. Angiolet said landing the mobile rights for individual shows was largely uncharted territory, but the company reached deals for discrete programs instead of entire networks.

Go90 is the latest television streaming service introduced in the last year to give viewers more alternatives to watching television outside the traditional cable or satellite bundle. That includes Sling TV, from the satellite provider Dish Network, which offers about 20 channels in a core package for $20 a month and add-ons for an extra $5 a month.

HBO, Showtime and CBS have introduced stand-alone streaming offerings that do not require subscriptions to pay television. The companies have released few figures on the number of subscribers for these services, making it unclear how much demand there is for them.

Verizon’s rival AT&T closed its $48.5 billion takeover of the satellite company DirecTV this summer, with executives promising that the combined entity would build next-generation entertainment offerings for on-the-go customers who watch across a proliferation of screens.

The explosion of options is an attempt to appeal to the growing number of people who have dropped their subscriptions to a traditional TV service or never signed up at all — a worrying trend to the industry. The rate of so-called cord-cutting accelerated during the second quarter this year, industry analysts say.

At the same time, the television industry is experiencing sharp ratings declines as digital and mobile viewing are booming. But business models on those new outlets remain uncertain.

Verizon introduced a new television offering in April through its FiOS service that gives customers more options to pay for the channels they watch and not pay for the ones they don’t. ESPN filed a lawsuit against Verizon, arguing that the telecommunications company had breached its contract. Verizon declined to comment on the litigation.

The Go90 service is intended to encourage users to share their experience with friends and across social media. Users will set up profiles to personalize their viewing. The service will continually update with new shows and content.

“It’s Hulu meets Twitter meets Netflix, with all of this social content,” Ms. Walden said.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Verizon to Offer Free Mobile TV Service, Hoping to Draw Millennials. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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