Cable One made good on its promise to begin the launch of a new IPTV service, Sparklight TV, lighting up Longview, Texas, in March, with five more markets to come soon.
Cable One first said in January it would launch an IPTV offering early this year in conjunction with MobiTV. Although MobiTV filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 3 -- T-Mobile agreed to loan the company $15.5 million in debtor-in-possession financing to keep the doors open -- those plans apparently are going ahead.
“We continue to believe that Mobi has a good solution in the market and are closely monitoring their Chapter 11 process,” Cable One senior director of corporate communications Patricia Niemann said in an email message.
News of the launches was first reported by Light Reading.
According to its customer support website, Cable One launched Sparklight TV this month and five other markets are “coming soon,” likely in April: Bisbee, Arizona; Altus, Oklahoma; Duncan, Oklahoma; and Dyersburg, Tennessee.
On the website, Cable One reiterated plans to expand Sparklight TV to all its markets by the end of the year. It estimated that Sparklight TV would eventually take the place of its traditional set-top based video service.
Cable One, which rebranded as Sparklight in 2019, has long de-emphasized traditional video service in favor of broadband. In Q4, Cable One’s broadband customers outnumbered its video subscribers by a more than 3:1 margin, and the company said that more than 97% of its homes passed have access to 1 Gigabit per second speeds
The Sparklight TV app will run on streaming services like Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, and Apple TV. Features like video on demand, program restart and DVR capabilities are delivered via the MobiTV Connect platform. But so far, Roku support is not yet available.
