Go90

 ( 2015 Establishments In New York City ) 

On October 26, 2016, Verizon acquired Vessel, a streaming video startup led by former Hulu executives, Jason Kilar and Richard Tom. The purchase was a Acqui-hiring, resulting in Vessel being shut down at the end of the month, and its staff re-assigned to work on go90. Kilar departed from the company. On January 23, 2017, it was reported that Verizon had laid off 155 go90 employees from its San Jose office, which had been displaced by the acquired Vessel staff. Tom was appointed as chief technology officer of Verizon Digital Entertainment. During Verizon's fourth-quarter earnings report the next day, it was revealed that average daily usage of the go90 app was "consistent sequentially at about 30 minutes per viewer." In early February, a Verizon spokesperson told FierceVideo that the service had seen organic growth over the past two months.

In late March 2017, go90 released a significant redesign of its mobile app, which was designed to help improve discovery and content recommendations and prioritize live content (such as sports) within the interface. The redesign also incorporated the "motion poster" concept for advertisement displays that originated from Vessel. Chip Canter was replaced as general manager in April 2017 by Tom. The following month, it was reported that go90's app had 2.1 million average monthly users.

In 2017, go90 began a three-year deal with the National Women's Soccer League to stream all games not aired on television.

Concerns were also displayed over Verizon's announced intent to Zero-rating, noting the company's stance against net neutrality.

The NWSL's streams on go90 faced sustained criticism from sportswriters: The Equalizer felt that the app was buggy and did not have the same wide device support as YouTube, while it was also argued that the relative obscurity of go90, and the inconsistent quality of the game streams, could harm the league's growth. After repeated technical issues, the league would live-stream several weeks of matches domestically on the NWSL website.

Verizon subsequently acquired Yahoo!, and merged it with AOL into the subsidiary Oath. Its lead executive Tim Armstrong stated in February 2018 that go90 had been placed within the Oath division, but would likely be wound-down in the future. Armstrong admitted that go90 was a "super ambitious project", but that it was difficult to build its brand, and that its content deals could be better leveraged by Oath's individual properties instead. In March 2018, Oath-owned blog platform Tumblr began to syndicate some of go90's original content internationally—which Digiday considered as being a pilot project for this strategy.

After the more aggressive promotion of its content across AOL and Yahoo properties, go90 had managed to increase its average monthly user count to 17 million. On June 29, 2018, Oath officially announced that go90 would be shuttered on July 31, 2018. The company stated that it would be evaluating the future of go90's original series and that it would "focus on building its digital-first brands at scale in sports, finance, news and entertainment for today's mobile consumers and tomorrow's 5G applications."

Estimates vary on the losses attributed to the failed service. Digiday cited two sources close to go90 who estimated total spending of $1.2  billion, including the Vessel and OnCue acquisitions. In Verizon's filing for the third quarter of 2018, it cited $913 million in charges related to "product realignment" attributable to shutting down go90. In September 2018, Verizon laid off 50 employees in the Content Operations group managed by Brian Angiolet and eliminated the group. Ivana Kirkbride and Richard Tom were among the departing employees.

At least two of the initiatives launched by Verizon Hearst Media Partners—Seriously.TV and Rated Red—were shuttered in 2017 and 2018 respectively. In 2018, AwesomenessTV was sold to Viacom for $50 million—a fraction of Verizon's $650 million valuation. Digiday reported that the company had depended strongly on content investments by Verizon for around 40% of its revenue, and that there had been animosity within the venture due to its majority partner DreamWorks Animation being acquired by a subsidiary of Comcast—a direct competitor to Verizon. Comcast also did not believe that AwesomenessTV aligned well with its other digital media investments, such as BuzzFeed and Vox Media. In June 2021 as part of its upcoming IPO, BuzzFeed announced that it would acquire Complex Media from Verizon Hearst Media Partners.

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