MobiTV, an app-based pay TV video streaming platform, is on the edge of bankruptcy, and has been relying on at least one of its customers to help cover monthly operational costs, LightReading reported. The company has raised over USD 200 million across 20 years, including USD 50 million in July 2019. If it does not find a solution to its financial issues, it may be forced to shut down and explore a liquidation, sources said. This could jeopardize a group of pay-TV service providers that rely on MobiTV's multi-tenant platform and its support for streaming apps that work with a broad set of TV and mobile streaming devices and platforms.
Many of MobiTV's partners use the system to supply streaming boxes that boot up to the operator's pay-TV app. They have also used MobiTV's white-label approach to launch customisid, branded apps for several retail streaming products from companies such as Roku, Amazon and Apple.
T-Mobile US is seen as MobiTV's top customer. The companies teamed up in May to help support a new version of TVision, launched in November, that effectively replaced TVision Home, a pay-TV platform formed from T-Mobile's 2018 acquisition of Denver-based Layer3 TV. TVision Home was shut down on December 30, 2020. MobiTV has made T-Mobile US fully aware of its financial situation; the operator is now exploring other options, sources said, and has declined to comment on the matter.
Other known US MobiTV customers include Cable One, Consolidated Communications, MCTV, Vast Broadband, Windstream, C Spire and EPB. A number of MobiTV's deals with cable operators originate from a partnership that MobiTV formed in 2017 with the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), an organization that makes product and programming deals on behalf of independent cable operators and service providers.
Cable One announced in January that it would work with MobiTV on a new IPTV service called Sparklight TV that will debut in select markets early this year and reach all of the operator's markets by year-end. Cable One is continuing its launch of Sparklight TV as planned, a company official said.
