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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday August 29 2020, @04:48PM (2 children)
Seems to me that the telecoms are trying to create and maintain an artificial distinction.
They do this because most people (esp. older ones) don't understand that it's all data, and see them as distinct, so the companies try to milk them using this ignorance.
Same story with text message. A text takes a fraction of the data of voice, but the pricing has been set up to milk the value of communication no matter the form
It used to be this way 10 years ago, but not any more. Any decent service plan these days has unlimited voice and text.
Texting is still crap, though, and you should avoid it: it's a fundamentally unreliable service. There is no guarantee your message will arrive to the recipient, because this was never designed into the system. Sometimes your texts will go around SMS and use data channels, if you and the recipient are both on the same network or using the same texting app that detects this (Verizon's Message+ is like this). But this is why other messaging apps have risen up: they let you send and received text messages, but they have modern features like reliable delivery, read receipts, ability to send files or photos, etc. SMS texting only has those when someone does a hacky workaround. Also, texts are tied to your phone, rather than a central service, so if something happens to your phone, or you upgrade phones, generally your text messaging history vanishes. With a central service like FB Messenger, this doesn't happen: you log in and everything is there, which is also handy for being able to use your PC to use the service in addition to your phone. Seriously, SMS texting is just archaic and obsolete and should be retired.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Sunday August 30 2020, @10:18AM (1 child)
Google Messages has already solved pretty much everything you're complaining about with SMS.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday August 30 2020, @01:39PM
I've never even heard of this app. I just looked it up on the play store and all the latest reviews are 1 star; it looks like they broke it somehow.
Anyway, how would this solve anything? It sounds a lot like Apple's texting app: works great if the recipient is also using the same app, but otherwise it just defaults back to SMS. And since around half the country uses iPhones, that means you'll be using SMS with half your contacts.