CenturyLink is what you might call a hot mess right now. The company's lagging broadband upgrades make it clear that residential customers across countless markets simply aren't a priority. That apathy has resulted in a steady stream of customer defections as customers in many un-upgraded markets flee to faster cable speeds. While millions of customers within its footprint struggle with sub-6 Mbps speeds, CenturyLink has shifted its focus toward enterprise service with its recent acquisition of Level 3.
CenturyLink is also facing a
wave of lawsuits over fraudulent billing, after a whistleblower revealed the company routinely overbills its users and upgrades users to services they neither wanted nor asked for.
While this is all occurring, there's every indication the company is giving up completely on TV service; both its Prism IPTV service, and the company's short-lived foray into streaming video.
CenturyLink recent stated that the company would be killing off its creatively-named CenturyLink Stream streaming video service after only a year or so of trials. The company's website now says the service is ending and CenturyLink is no longer taking new customers. The company gives no explanation for axing the service, though it's believed that the one-two punch of CenturyLink's residential apathy and consumer disinterest doomed the project.
Users in our forums also say that CenturyLink has effectively given up on its more traditional Prism IPTV service, something the company has been hinting at for the better part of a year. Customers who used to subscribe to Prism TV are now being sold DirecTV as a bundle. Though that hasn't gone smoothly either, with CenturyLink recently having been sued for sloppily exposing user data to the open internet.
"Due to emerging market trends in video content and delivery, we do not plan to expand our Prism TV service offering," CenturyLink tells Fierce Wireless. “We will continue to provide service and support to our current Prism TV subscribers and make the service available to qualified customers who request it in the markets where we currently offer Prism TV."
CenturyLink also confirmed the death of its streaming video ambitions.
“CenturyLink continually evaluates the products and services we offer and makes changes when needed,” the company said in another statement. “We conducted various trials of our CenturyLink Stream over-the-top video solution, but plan to discontinue this service in April 2018. We are exploring options to meet market demand for streaming video services.”
There have been ongoing rumors that CenturyLink may just divest its consumer-facing assets (read: sell off all unwanted residential networks) and focus entirely to business services, but the company remains mum on such plans. At the very least CenturyLink is signaling that it no longer thinks residential broadband, especially upgrades for un-upgraded areas, are particularly important, which will only drive defections.
In short: pay TV margins are tightening, upgrading aging DSL lines is expensive, and CenturyLink may just prefer to focus on more profitable business-grade services in the largely urban areas it appears to actually care about. As with
Frontier's dysfunction, this is all great news for cable operators happy to see even less viable competition across many of their markets, but less stellar for customers who'll see higher prices and less incentive for improvement as a result.