The rise and fall of +play: one content aggregation service to rule them all
Jonathan Grover
Product and Business Strategy Leader | Creating Superpowers for People and Products
Sometimes... just sometimes, building a product doesn't actually start with the product (blasphemous, I know).
Nowhere is this truer than in a large corporate. Say you work for a company that turns over $100+ billion dollars a year, as is the case with the focus of our story, Verizon .
You're an eager product leader – in touch with your customers, their journey, their pain points. And you come up with a brilliant product idea. You spend time researching, planning, forecasting – and the TLDR of the pitch is this: give me $1M to build the product, and in 12-36 months, I'll solve our customer's pain, drive delight, and get you to $100M revenue – a ~100X ROI.
Sounds amazing, right?
Except you can't even get the words out to pitch. $100M isn't even a rounding error at $100B scale. It won't improve a year, won't swing a quarter – won't even be worth marketing.
Concepts like +play (we'll get to what it is in a second) often start around corporate decisioning 101: how to get approval.
Corporate Decisioning – A Concise Masterclass
Step 1: The Cocktail Party Business Case
Product leaders at big corporates know that they face a critical question – is the magnitude of the potential return big enough? I like the cocktail napkin test – can we come up with a simple concept and make the math work?
Picture this: two leaders (say a VP of Product and a VP of Strategy) chatting over libations after an offsite for next year's fiscal planning. The VP of Product, seeking the next project to pursue, discusses their concept.
For a while the company has tangentially offered/included streaming subscriptions – could we dial that up to 11 and find some new subscriptions to sell?
The two work through some back-of-the-napkin math.
As one of 3 major operators in the US, we can assume the ability to reach about 1/3 of the population easily – so for easy math, assume 100M people (that's a sizable addressable market). Now let's lowball it and assume a very modest attach rate around subscriptions they're already interested in: 1%. What's a subscription cost? Let's plug in $10/month.
100M x 1% x $10/month = $10M/month or $120M a year
Not bad, sounds like found money, but not big enough.
If we're doing this right:
100M x 5% x $20/month x 2 = $200M/month or ~$2.5B a year
BOOM! We're in business!
Step 2: Does this make strategic sense?
Mega trend: let's start with streaming services. In some areas the company sells TV services – so it knows the content side of buying behavior. And there is a well-documented rise in "cutting the cable" and moving to streaming services.
There's a trend to capitalize on, and our customers are doing it!
Assets to win: Verizon had previously been in the content space (Verizon Media) and was already including streaming services as part of the offers in some of the wireless plans. Simply put, the company had intellectual capital in the space, experience with streaming services, and pre-existing relationships with some of the content providers.
Check, check and ✅
Strategic value beyond financial value: I'll share an insight that's both immensely well-supported by actual data but also painfully obvious. The more products a customer buys from you, the less likely they are to churn. Let's get tactical (and personal) here - I stuck with internet from AT&T for much longer than I should have (considering they were much more expensive than equivalent competition) because I didn't want to have to solve how to migrate my HBO Max subscription (which having done so now actually saves me about $5 per month!). And I know I'm not alone – there's a catalyst to overcome to drive switching – so the more "products" a company has with a customer, the greater that catalyst must be.
Subscription services can increase customer stickiness and decrease churn
Step 3: What exactly is the +play product (now that we know it's going to make us oodles of money and be of strategic benefit)?
Maybe you're one of 100M Americans that may have had access to +play and this is redundant... but considering +play is no longer, that's probably not a great assumption for me to make. Thus, I'll give it to you simply.
It was a subscription services hub – and not just for your streaming content services like Netflix or Paramount+.
So putting on our product hats, let's consider some of the USPs and what needs to be true to achieve them (we'll be analyzing those a bit more in a second... after all, this is a bit of a post-mortem).
One Stop Hub for Purchasing Your Subscription Services
Needs to be true: The subscription service you want to buy needs to be here! Great execution involves filling out subscription categories without major gaps. A frictionless purchase and discovery interface is key.
One Bill to Rule them All
Needs to be true: Simple, seamless monthly billing – you're already getting a regular bill from Verizon, this is a no-brainer, right?
The Place to Manage Your Subscription Services
Needs to be true: A reason to switch from your existing purchase channel (e.g. direct from the service, or via another 3P) to Verizon. A seamless experience migrating your subscription to Verizon. A beautiful management interface.
Optimization (Reduction) of Your Subscription Services
Needs to be true: Knowledge of your usage of subscription services. A recommendation engine. Willingness to see your bill decrease.
Before we unpack how +play did, I have to comment – I believe these are absolutely stellar USPs for creating a great overlay product in the subscription space. With a solid and achievable business case, strong strategic rationale, and clear achievable means of creating a winning product, you can only imagine that both as a Verizon leader and as a Verizon customer, I was a big fan of what this could become!
Stifling the greatness: where the product fell short
I obviously can't share the behind-the-scenes view at Verizon (I make that comment in case it wasn't obvious) - so instead this is my post-mortem as a business leader in product.
+play wasn't actually Verizon's purchase hub
I get a LOT of subscription services from Verizon (welcome to the insider view of my content life):
The only one of these subscription services offered via +play was the Netflix bundle, which kind of seems like trying to win with one hand tied behind your back.
Some strategic reasons for that choice:
And while all that makes perfect sense, none of it changes the reality that most of the subscriptions I buy from Verizon weren't actually via +play!
+play didn't achieve the needed coverage of its subscription categories
I noted that one of the categories of subscription services available was gaming subscriptions. And indeed, Microsoft's Xbox Live was the marquee offer (woot woot!).
Unfortunately, at least in my household, we're on the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch console path – both with their own subscription offers (yes, I pay for those too).
Here Verizon has me as a +play customer and is going after a subscription category where I'm a buyer – but doesn't actually offer the subscriptions I purchase 🙁
For some data-based context, approximately 5-10% of US gamers have either a PlayStation Plus or Switch Online membership.
That's quite a bit of money being left on the table!
+play UX left something (a lot) to be desired, especially around billing
I encountered a fair share of... let's just go with... disappointing UX and user journey issues with +play itself. While many were rectified over time, there was always friction to get to +play from another Verizon "property." And please don't get me started about the challenges I had when I had to move over my Paramount+ subscription to +play.
But most disappointing of all is that the "one bill to rule them all" USP is non-existent.
When I bought something from +play for the first time, I had to enter all my payment info again (for absolute clarity, I was already a Verizon AutoPay customer!).
And then I get a different monthly bill from my Verizon wireless bill.
Subscription optimization? That's just Grover's product dream!
I'll be honest, this one was never in the cards. It wasn't something that was part of the product features – but if this isn't a killer use case to drive behavior change and switching to +play...
These types of features are always hard to drive prioritization around in a product roadmap - step someone down, collect LESS money from them, in order to show them value and increase their longevity? Yet it's hard to believe that delivering this type of customer value wouldn't engender the type of stickiness that underlies the strategic rationale for a product like +play.
The +play Super Bowl ad!
No, there was no Super Bowl ad. I'm not sure I ever saw any +play marketing other than in the Verizon app and via email blast.
I'm allowed to say they were trying to win with one hand tied behind their backs again???
One of the most amazing parts of the big 3 telco operating model in the US is the amazing reach (and spend) around marketing that drives the sales engine. To not be able to harness that growth engine to drive the billion-dollar product is.... (cue sound of balloon deflating)
+play, please take my money
Nevertheless, I loved this product – I'm still a customer. I'm not sure exactly how my bundle savings work on the Netflix-Paramount+/Showtime subscription I get from +play, except to say I've done the math, and I'm saving money every month, and that's absolutely a delighter in my relationship with Verizon.
I believe the product offered in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 different subscriptions across a range of categories – which is nothing short of an impressive feat.
I would've gladly migrated my Peloton membership over to +play (I buy it direct from Peloton) for simpler billing and management, although that was never an option.
So despite shortcomings, there was so much value in the subscription purchasing hub that you probably didn't use and may never have heard of.
With all that said, I'll leave you with this thinking – while it may be hard to execute on the type of promise and value that a +play could have:
Fractional Marketing Leader | Go-to-Market, Growth & AI Marketing Solutions | Scaling Brands from $0 to $Millions
1wSo many excellent learnings here. But also, I didn't know you had a Peloton membership!