Verizon CEO says freebies aren’t as important as network quality

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam had a few choice words for competitors like AT&T and T-Mobile, who have begun offering free HBO and Netflix to their subscribers. McAdam says he doesn’t believe Verizon needs to offer an incentive to potential customers to get them to use the network since network quality should matter much more.

“I don’t know that you have to give away something that has value in order to sell your service. That’s the edges we’re going around at this point. … At the end of the day, customers will buy based on their experience, doing what they need to do, not whether they have Netflix or not.”

McAdam’s comments come after AT&T announced that it would be offering HBO to all of its Unlimited Choice and Unlimited Plus customers. T-Mobile has done something similar by offering free Netflix to its family plan subscribers. It’s not hard to see why Verizon is now squawking about freebies being thrown in since even Sprint offers customers six months of free Tidal service.

We wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Verizon is offering something similar a few months down the line, since that’s what the company typically does. Just a few months before re-introducing their Unlimited Plans, Verizon’s CFO was blasting T-Mobile and AT&T for bringing them back and said Verizon customers don’t need it. McAdam even casually suggests that Verizon itself could offer Showtime.

If we wanted to offer something like HBO, we can call [CBS] and get Showtime in a commercial arrangement. I don’t need to own the content in order to prove that to customers.”

It’ll be interesting to see which freebies Verizon offers its customers first. Hulu’s out since AT&T now owns Time Warner, which owns a stake in the video streaming service. Perhaps Showtime? Either way, Verizon will probably end up on this new trend of freebies from mobile carriers soon enough.