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from the only-lost-$500-million-per-month...for-60-consecutive-months dept.
After Buying DirecTV For $50 Billion In 2015, AT&T Now Seeks To Sell It For Under $20 Billion:
How do you destroy $30 billion in value in just five years? If you are AT&T, you buy DirecTV in 2015 for $50 billion and five years later you try to sell it - now renamed to AT&TTV - for less than $20 billion, a loss of 60% on the deal.
That, according to the Wall Street Journal is what AT&T hopes to do as it takes "a fresh look its DirecTV business" exploring a deal for a service wounded by cord-cutting. And by fresh look, the journal means sell.
When AT&T announced plans to acquire DirecTV in May 2014, the vision was to control some 26 million TV subscribers. However, the resulting slump in cable and satellite viewership due to the relentless encroachment of streaming services, the value of DirecTV has seen a sharp drop in recent years and the result is yet another catastrophic media deal. And since the pay-TV unit has shed 7 million U.S. video connections over the past two years, a deal could value the business below $20 billion, the WSJ sources said.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by lizardloop on Saturday August 29 2020, @02:42PM (3 children)
I worked for Directv as a software contractor right at the time AT&T bought them. The software on their cable box was interesting to say the least. It was basically a stripped down linux with a bunch of different user space daemons that ran the various services on the box. For instance the front panel LEDs were controlled by a daemon written in C that took in UDP packets for what to display. Then you had a bunch of C++ stuff that ran the local database of program information and a few system functions. On top of all that was the worst pile of Java garbage I've ever seen for doing the UI. The underlying platform wasn't great but it was hardly the worst I'd seen. The whole thing was brought to its knees by just how awfully engineered the UI layer was though. Just displaying a basic screen of information to the user would result in tens if not hundreds of calls to various sub systems. All of which had to be done via different IPC mechanism. All of which had various mutex locks that needed to be opened and closed. In order to keep the thing "responsive" they'd gone with a thread pool model. So you had 20 threads and most things that needed to happen got chucked on to the thread pool. In order to get things to happen in the right order they used hundreds of different mutexes. The thing deadlocked constantly. Reproducing a bug was nigh on impossible because of all the concurrency. The log files it spat out were huge and completely unreadable unless you'd been there for at least six months. The entire six months I was there I think I saw about 10 bugs fixed. One guy on the team spent a whole 3 months just looking at one relatively minor issue and eventually handed the ticket back because he was unable to figure out what was going wrong. Moral on the team was through the floor.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 29 2020, @04:21PM
Yeah, that thing _never_ locked up and needed to be rebooted, did it? /s
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @04:45PM
> One guy on the team spent a whole 3 months just looking at one relatively minor issue and eventually
> handed the ticket back because he was unable to figure out what was going wrong.
> Moral on the team was through the floor.
This is like most places I have worked at (university research). Places seem to do well for a couple of years when a few good people work together, but one leaves and one gets promoted. Now you've got a legacy system that works now but nobody maintains and nobody new understands. In a couple of year you are back to the Stone Age.
For those interested in the work (rather than getting the promotion) it's a disaster zone. The guy who got promoted thinks he solved everything but doesn't/can't do the work any more. He's safely on the Purchasing Oversight Committee getting his $300k and all your proposals need to go through him (for addition of his name, if the work is up to his standards obviously).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @07:07PM
My parents got DirecTV after ATT bought them... I scanned the box with nmap, bunch of open ports, UPnP, running a 2.something LTS kernel that was years behind on patches.