Five years ago this week… TDS Telecom—a relative minnow in the US pay TV arena— joined the race to become the country’s first operator to launch a TV service built around Android TV Operator Tier. However, the telco told Faultline at the time that fellow US operators Windstream and RCN were poised to beat TDS to launch. Listed as the 20th-largest multichannel video service provider with 156,000 video subscribers at the time, TDS Telecom was preparing to roll out a new TV offering built around its cloud TV platform TDS TV+, running on an Arris-made Android TV set top with TiVo software, delivered over Velocix CDN infrastructure and secured by Verimatrix. TDS TV+ is still operational today, and in 2021 was deployed on eStream 4K set tops from Evolution Digital.…