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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 Phoenix666 on Saturday August 29 2020, @06:49PM (1 child)
DirecTV was the last cable service we had before we cut the cord. It was expensive, and they were arrogant. The service itself liked to fritz out on rainy/stormy days when you'd most like to stay inside and watch TV. The interface was painfully slow, like every other cable box I've ever seen.
I laugh now when I see my brother-in-law's cable box. They've added a Netflix "channel" he can turn to to access their content (if you are a subscriber to Netflix, of course); the interface, again, is painfully slow, such that he pays hundreds of dollars per month to crawl through a brain-damaged mimicry of a Roku.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday August 29 2020, @10:00PM
I got rid of DirectTV when my landlord had the roof replaced. The roofers left the satellite dish hanging down on the side of the apartment. I figured I would call to have it reconnected when they were done, but in the meantime I had a ton of stuff saved on the DVR to watch. Or so I thought, at midnight the first day the recording I was watching and everything else I had saved suddenly disappeared, with just an infinite message saying it was downloading. I was really pissed off, to say the least. You couldn't call anyone, it had to be "business hours". I went to my account online and left a message that I wanted to cancel my service. I specifically stated I did not want to talk to anyone on the phone or debate about it. To my complete surprise, within an hour I received an e-mail stating my account was closed! I did of course receive a final bill from them, and after I paid they told me the DVR for which I had been paying a monthly fee was "non-recoverable" and could be recycled. It's still sitting there, someday when I am bored enough I might open it up and see if the hard drive has anything usable on it. I assume it has one.