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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @03:52PM
I bring this up whenever cable television and streaming services are advertised. To me the absolute killer difference is that with Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO, Amazon Prime, and everything like them the price advertised is exactly what you pay. Maybe some kind of state or federal government fee gets added, but that's it.
For years my wife insisted on paid cable television because she wanted first run access to shows that were not available on the local over-the-air broadcasts. Sporting events, TNT, Sci fi channel, whatever. We bounced back and forth between Comcast and DirecTV, and it was always a nightmare where basically the advertised price and what you actually paid had no connection to each other. I would rather pay $100 per month that was advertised as $100 per month than pay $70 per month when the company advertised it as $42 per month. We cut the cable about five years ago and never looked back, and I won't look at paid television ever again, no matter how good the offer is, unless a company adopts a truth-in-advertising policy. Fat fucking chance.