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posted by martyb on Friday September 20 2019, @03:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the nuke-it-from-orbit-it's-the-only-way-to-be-sure dept.

AT&T Explores Parting Ways With DirecTV:

Telecom giant considers fate of DirecTV satellite unit as cord-cutting saps subscriber base

AT&T Inc. is exploring parting with its DirecTV unit, people familiar with the matter said, a sharp reversal from Chief Executive Randall Stephenson's strategy to make the $49 billion bet on the satellite provider a key piece of the phone giant's future.

The telecom giant has considered various options, including a spinoff of DirecTV into a separate public company and a combination of DirecTV's assets with Dish Network Corp., its satellite-TV rival, the people said.

AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV in the fold. Despite the satellite service's struggles, as consumers drop their TV connections, it still contributes a sizable volume of cash flow and customer accounts to its parent.

AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company's shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

Related: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/09/18/1656205

Like Blockbuster, DirecTV, Dish, etc. are extremely slow to catch onto the whole Netflix/Amazon Prime Ad-Free, pick-what-I-want-to-watch model.


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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Friday September 20 2019, @04:05AM (5 children)

    by edIII (791) on Friday September 20 2019, @04:05AM (#896384)

    That was always the problem. They can't compete with the services of the satellites in LEO because of bandwidth. HEO and geostationary is a pretty cool feature, but it doesn't lend itself well to low latency network communications and high bandwidth media.

    They needed to capitalize on what they do really well, which is reach very remote areas that land based services will not service. That's not a trivial market. If they had their heads in the game, they would've changed to all on-demand programming and ditched the scheduled bullshit that only really works for people 50+. Hell, they could've partnered up with Netflix, Amazon, and even Blockbuster to bring their content over their network with custom receivers that let you choose which account your logging into. Then offered to HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc the ability to stream content to their users. Something like that may well have kept people paying $100/mo+.

    Where they definitely fucked up was keeping an ancient business model lumbering through the future on its own inertia, while everything around them upgraded, sped up, and delivered more popular features.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 20 2019, @06:17AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 20 2019, @06:17AM (#896411) Journal

    They needed to capitalize on what they do really well, which is reach very remote areas that land based services will not service. That's not a trivial market.

    Maybe not a trivial market in the number of potential customers.
    What about their purchasing power?

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 20 2019, @11:18AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 20 2019, @11:18AM (#896456)

      Well, those are exactly the people who aren't going out to the club on saturday night because the closest club is 500 miles away, so ... Ditto pro sports, etc.

  • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday September 20 2019, @02:43PM (2 children)

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 20 2019, @02:43PM (#896507) Homepage Journal

    If they had their heads in the game, they would've changed to all on-demand programming and ditched the scheduled bullshit that only really works for people 50+.

    Does a satellite have the data rate for that? A scheduled bullshit channel only needs to broadcast one scheduled program at a time to many users. On demand programming needs to send out many, many different data streams, each of approximately the same bandwidth.

    -- hendrik

    • (Score: 2) by edIII on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:14AM (1 child)

      by edIII (791) on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:14AM (#897017)

      Good point. I thought I had seen some on demand programming the last time I looked at a DirecTv setup. So perhaps it was it more on request than on demand? It would cache an existing stream and wait till it received everything before allowing it to play. That would allow you to collapse, or multiplex the programming. Then you would be limited to the number of channels multiplied by 24 hours. You would have to wait for your show to be allocated a slot along with all of the other subscribers. Popular and current content would receive more bandwidth obviously.

      That's still not satisfying consumer demand, nor does it compete with land based services. My idea is a Hail Mary at best, and only works with people that have satellite as their only choice.

      --
      Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 22 2019, @12:39PM

        by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday September 22 2019, @12:39PM (#897085) Homepage Journal

        Yes, I can see it working in remote areas where satellite is the only choice. And even if there's a 24-hour delay, or longer, I can see it working better than the nearly bankrupt DVD rental place 50 miles away. Though bandwidth would still likely restrict it to the more popular offerings.

        But for those popular offerings it would likely work better than downloading (encrypted) movies from Netflix before viewing them, because it would be organised for those shared downloads.

        What kind of download protocol would be suitable here?