article at https://example.com/2Z9zYzJ
Great explanation of every misstep AT&T has made after the massive T-Mobile misstep (excerpt from the article. There's more in there):
In simplest terms, the plan seemed to be: “We’ll launch a bunch of pay TV services and a supersized version of HBO. We’ll give away ad-supported HBO (which everyone will clearly want, despite 30 years of ad-free HBO) to anyone who subscribes to our pay TV services and our mobile phone service. Then we’ll take all that data from our many TV and mobile services and funnel it through Xandr as a great way to target consumers across multiple platforms. Brands will love it!”
Only things did not go as planned, because they never factored consumer into the equation and whether they would love it.
They did not.
AT&T has lost around 1 million pay TV subscribers in each of the last three quarters. It’s not hard to figure out why either. They have five different services, maybe more—it’s hard to keep track. There’s DirecTV, DirecTV Now which is now called AT&T TV Now, AT&T TV, which is not DirecTV, but rather an IP-based service, U-verse, and something called WatchTV.
All of their many services did have one thing in common—at a time when everyone else was selling on service in the form of simplicity and interface design, AT&T was selling on price and when those introductory offers went away, so did their subscribers.
Which is why it’s no surprise that AT&T is looking to offload DirecTV and various private equity groups are being bandied about as the most likely buyers, especially if AT&T won’t sell to Dish, which is at least trying to be innovative with its satellite and Sling TV services.
Xandr too seems to be on the verge of imploding, hence the recent rumors of a “for sale” sign there too and the concurrent reaction from the industry which has been “what could they actually sell and who in their right mind would buy it?”
Brian Lesser, Xandr’s original CEO is long gone and they’ve never been able to get their video inventory game going because all the people who have video inventory see AT&T as a competitor and don’t want the fox in the proverbial h-nhouse.
Plus there’s the part where Verizon said they were not going to be using their mobile data to target customers for their TV advertising, which, at a time of such heightened focus on privacy, makes AT&T’s decision to use mobile data to target TV viewers seem kind of sleazy.
So there’s that, and there’s the fact that HBO Max is off to a sluggish start and still hasn’t really convinced many people who did not already have HBO that they need to come on board, especially now that “HBO style” programming is available through all the seven of the other Flixes.
So, there’s that too.
To their credit, AT&T did not make one of Verizon’s big mistakes, which was to hire people with no TV experience to run TV-centric projects. But while they’ve seemingly made the right hires, the die was already cast and there was little those folks could do to make it work.