Business

Verizon wants a national TV audience

Verizon is having conversations with major programmers about how to bring its FiOS programming service to a national audience, sources say.

Such a move would ape similar attempts by Comcast and Dish to gain control over TV channel rights that go beyond their existing footprint in the event the business goes through a radical shift.

The radical shift would mainly be a change in how customers access their pay TV — away from a locally connected fiber-optic network toward a broadband service.

For years it’s been common for Verizon to have conversations about gaining access to particular shows, two sources said, but more recently, the Gotham-based telecom giant has been asking about acquiring rights for a full suite of channels.

“They’ve had exploratory talks about how to become a virtual [multiple-system operator],” one person close to the conversations said. “It’s a question of how to get there.”

CEO Lowell McAdam and his executive team also needs to figure out which branch of government controls oversight of broadband, sources said.

It is also noodling whether it needs programmer deals first before it goes to market, and whether it should first market its TV Everywhere product and then open it up to consumers beyond its base of five million subscribers.

Verizon already has a streaming service that it operates in concert with Redbox.

“[Distributors] are starting to ask for these rights in some fashion — nobody wants to get left behind if things start to move that way,” a separate programming source said.

Rob Marcus, head of rival Time Warner Cable, speaking at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch media conference Wednesday in LA, said the cable operator had no intention of moving to a broadband delivery system.

“At this point we don’t really aspire to delivering an over-the-top service,” Marcus said. “Our value proposition is delivering video via our facilities as opposed to being a retailer of somebody else’s video, which is a somewhat commoditized product.”

Verizon declined to comment.