Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

TV Stocks Tumble after AT&T Cord-Cutting Disclosure

posted by martyb on Saturday October 14 2017, @02:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the cut-it-out! dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

A day after DirecTV parent AT&T said it would lose subscribers because people are ditching their satellite and cable television services — a phenomenon known as cord-cutting — shares of companies heavily invested in the TV industry tumbled.

Shares of AT&T, the culprit in Thursday's sell-off, dropped 6 percent, dragging shares of its presumed merger partner, Time Warner, down 2 percent in the process.

AT&T said in a regulatory filing that in the recently ended quarter it would report gaining 300,000 subscribers to its over-the-top digital service while losing 390,000 traditional TV subscribers, for a net loss of 90,000 subs.

While it cited several causes — including hurricanes and changing its credit standards for new customers — it was this line in the filing that Wall Street keyed on: "The video net losses were driven by heightened competition in traditional pay TV markets and OTT services ..."

Bet somebody at AT&T got fired today...

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
TV Stocks Tumble after AT&T Cord-Cutting Disclosure | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 20 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:35PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 14 2017, @05:35PM (#582345)

    Thanks to internet enabled cable boxes they could even use symmetric key encryption by branch and do individual channel unlocks for *EVERY* customer, or even *EVERY INDIVIDUAL CABLE BOX*.

    Imagine being able to unlock the porn channels only on the TV in the parents bedroom. Only unlock the kids channels on the kids boxes. Sports only in the living room. Not everyone would want this feature, but it adds a *LOT* of flexibility to the ala carte pricing options. Quite frankly either style (broadcast over cable, or video over ip) could benefit from this layout. The original reason for bundlng was technical limitations since cable boxes originally had to be programmed on-site for the block of channels they could decode. Then it was the same but with over the cable updates for which channels you could decode. Today, with internet over cable and all the technological advances in cable boxes, there is no excuse for not having essentially instant changes in channel selection available for any consumer who wants in/out of a channel.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @05:07PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 16 2017, @05:07PM (#583057)

    When I worked for a satellite provider as customer service, this "individual to the box" type service was available in the system, but not in the "allowed to request/buy". At that point it was legacy from when each box required a completely separate subscription, and while technologically available was not a supported solution allowed by management. Pricing for "all" in the house is the same $ as it would be for a single box, and at times this had been mis-used in the past resulting in multiple "base" packages billed(independently) to the same house because of multiple boxes.