AT&T Looking To Dump DirecTV After Years Of Merger Headaches

Failures

from the merge-ALL-the-things! dept

AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV, believing this would turn the dodgy old phone company into an innovative new media juggernaut. But despite $42 billion in tax breaks and oodles of regulatory favors from the Trump administration (like killing net neutrality), AT&T simply couldn’t overcome its own nature as a bumbling, government-pampered telecom monopoly.

As a result, the company has laid off more than 52,848 employees, lost more than 8 million TV subscribers, and made numerous enemies by shitcanning numerous top executives, gutting numerous brands that were popular with consumers (Mad Magazine comes quickly to mind), and behaving like a cocky bully in a high school cafeteria despite having clearly no idea what it was actually doing.

AT&T was ultimately forced to sell Time Warner to Discovery, which somehow made things even worse. Now, after socking customers with two sets of price hikes this year alone, AT&T is purportedly considering exiting its 70 percent ownership stake in DirecTV as well. Apparently, and who would have guessed it, but there’s not much of a future in traditional satellite TV service:

“AT&T’s purported exploration of its DirecTV stake comes about as DirecTV and other pay-TV providers continue to shed subscribers. Leichtman Research Group (LRG) estimates that privately held DirecTV lost about 400,000 subscribers in Q2 2023, ending the quarter with 12.35 million.”

Great job everyone, terribly impressive. What was supposed to be a masterful gambit to position AT&T as a media colossus, instead resulted in an absolute swath of incompetence and dysfunction where hundreds of billions of dollars were all but set on fire. All while AT&T broadband customers in countless states remain stuck on aging DSL lines instead of fiber because the company has historically been too cheap to fully upgrade its networks (despite taxpayer subsidies).

There will, of course, be zero introspection from anybody in this chain — at AT&T or U.S. regulators — in terms of whether any of these deals should have proceeded in the first place. The entire saga will be memory holed so we can repeat the exact same process with some new media or telecom juggernaut a few years from now, having learned absolutely nothing from the experience.

There’s simply no financial incentive for anyone involved to think too deeply about any of it. Executives got their short term tax breaks, outsized compensation, and fail upwards participation trophies, while regulators got rewarded with shiny new revolving door opportunities. All while employees lost their jobs and consumers got stuck with price hikes and ever-shittier streaming services. Quite the innovation.

Filed Under: enshittification, growth for growth's sake, m&a, mergers, streaming, telecom, video
Companies: at&t, directv

DirecTV Kicks Right Wing Newsmax Off Its Cable Lineup, Prompting More Baseless GOP Whining About ‘Censorship’

Content Moderation

from the hallucinated-oppression dept

You might recall how struggling satellite TV network DirecTV recently kicked right wing propaganda channel OANN off of its cable lineup because it simply wasn’t profitable. That prompted weeks of performative hysteria by the GOP about how they were being “unfairly censored,” even prompting involvement of numerous Republican AGs who apparently had nothing better to do.

Now DirecTV has decided to kick the slightly less feral right wing propaganda channel Newsmax off of its cable lineup, prompting Newsmax to immediately run “news stories” falsely claiming they’ve been unfairly censored:

To be clear, cable companies will air pretty much any monumental pile of garbage if it makes them money, so the idea that this is anything other than just a boring business decision is idiotic. That didn’t stop the House GOP, who immediately proceeded to concoct an elaborate fiction in a letter to DirecTV about how it was part of some nefarious left wing censorship cabal:

“It has recently been revealed that Congressional Democrats and the White House coordinated closely with private companies to de-platform, de-monetize, or otherwise limit the reach of viewpoints they oppose and classify them as ‘misinformation,’” the House Republicans wrote. “As members of the House Republican Conference, we are deeply concerned about this un-democratic assault on free speech.”

The GOP is desperate to protect a propaganda apparatus successfully built over 45 years across AM radio, television, and the Internet. It’s what all the phony support for Big Tech “antitrust reform” is about. It’s what the whining about TikTok is partially about. With an unfavorably saggy demographic shift among young Americans and extremely unpopular policies, propaganda is all the GOP actually has.

DirecTV was quick to issue a statement making it clear they would have kept the channel, but its cost just wasn’t worth extending its contract, and that if right wingers want to consume the channel’s propaganda they can still happily do so via the Internet:

“On multiple occasions, we made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network, but ultimately Newsmax’s demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs that we would have to pass on to our broad customer base,” a DirecTV spokesperson told The Daily Beast shortly after midnight on Wednesday.

“Anyone, including our customers, can watch the network for free via NewsmaxTV.com, YouTube.com and on multiple streaming platforms like Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Google Play. We continually evaluate the most relevant programming to provide our customers and expect to fill this available channel with new content.”

Of course back when the GOP had something vaguely resembling a consistent ideology, meddling with the business decisions of major companies would have been frowned at. Now that the party has devolved into authoritarian gibberish and endless victimization porn to distract and agitate the base, it’s just dumb, performative bullshit, all the way down to bone marrow level.

Filed Under: cable news, cable tv, censorship, disinformation, misinformation, newsmax, propaganda
Companies: directv, newsmax

Court Laughs Off OAN Conspiracy Network’s Claim It Was ‘Censored’ By DirecTV

Legal Issues

from the opiate-of-the-very-gullible-masses dept

When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives. The AG lawsuit filed last March pulls out the traditional “Conservatives are being censored” victimization complex:

“This is an action to redress the unchecked influence and power that Defendants have wielded in an attempt to unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business and impede the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice.”

In reality, DirecTV executives simply didn’t think the channel was worth the trouble, so they didn’t renew OAN when the carriage agreement expired. Cable executives would air no limit of dangerous and unhinged gibberish if it made them money. But OAN’s viewership to headache and liability ratio was never a good mix for the already struggling satellite TV provider

A preliminary ruling by Judge John Meyer of California Superior Court in San Diego County shot down OAN’s breach of contract allegations, setting the stage for what’s expected to be a case dismissal. DirecTV filed an anti-SLAPP motion to strike the Herring Networks (OAN’s parent company) complaint, and DirecTV’s motion was granted in part and denied in part:

“As to the breach of the implied covenant claim, to the extent it is based on the non-renewal of the Affiliation Agreement, the claim fails because the agreement contains a fixed expiration date and no provision entitling Herring to a renewal.” 

Despite making a lot of headlines for dangerous bullshit (like the idea COVID was crafted in a North Carolina lab), the news channel never really saw all that many actual viewers. One estimate pegged daily viewership at around 14,000 a few years ago, and that was before the channel got kicked off of DirecTV and Verizon, its biggest distributors.

Without its two major cable distributors, OAN’s now mired in a scrum for attention with an endless sea of far right wing conspiracy influencers and grifters on the Internet. While also fending off other much more notable lawsuits, including Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit against One America News for spreading baseless election-fraud conspiracy theories.

Filed Under: anti-slapp, anti-slapp laws, conspiracy theories, election conspiracy, political propaganda, propaganda, right wing
Companies: directv, oan

NY Times Aptly Illustrates How The AT&T Time Warner Merger Was An Even Bigger Mess Than You Probably Realized

Failures

from the nobody-wins,-everybody-loses dept

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around incompetently for several years before recently spinning off the entire mess for a song.

The New York Times recently published the kind of merger post mortem the media usually can’t be bothered to do. The outlet spoke to dozens of individuals at the companies who detail how AT&T leadership was completely out of its depth, refused to take any advice, and blinded by the kind of hubris developed over a generation of being a government-pampered telecom monopoly.

While the Trump DOJ ultimately sued to stop the deal, it was never actually due to antitrust concerns. It was because a petulant President was mad at CNN for critical media coverage. And it was also because Time Warner repeatedly refused to sell itself to Fox boss Rupert Murdoch, who likely hoped to either kill the deal or nab some divested chunks of the acquired assets.

But the NYT tells an interesting tale of a meeting in which not only did Trump originally praise CNN, but AT&T promised it would fire CNN boss Jeff Zucker if the administration approved the deal:

Mr. Trump kept up his Twitter diatribe against CNN and Mr. Zucker. But on June 22, Mr. Stephenson visited the White House along with other chief executives, and Mr. Trump was surprisingly effusive in his praise for the AT&T chairman, saying publicly that he had done “really a top job.”

Mr. Stephenson’s warm presidential reception was shortly followed by a visit to Time Warner by Larry Solomon, the head of corporate communications for AT&T. Mr. Solomon told Mr. Ginsberg that he was there to give him a “heads up” that “we’re going to fire Jeff Zucker,” Mr. Ginsberg recalled.

AT&T denies that ever happened. Then again, it also tries to claim it didn’t take a total bath on the deal. The New York Times, meanwhile, seems to downplay the persistent indications that the Trump DOJ’s sudden and completely uncharacteristic interest in antitrust issues was not just a lawsuit driven by Trump’s petty anger at CNN, but Rupert Murdoch’s interest in acquiring or at least harming a competitor.

The Trump DOJ ultimately lost the lawsuit due to its sloppy failure to truly illustrate the consolidative harms of the deal (since again, they didn’t actually care about that aspect of it). Calls by ex-DOJ officials for an investigation into the DOJ abusing its power (since again, the lawsuit was mostly about Trump’s ego and helping Rupert Murdoch) went nowhere, as such things tend to do in the U.S.

AT&T’s attempt to pivot from stodgy old telco to modern video advertising juggernaut completely collapsed anyway under the weight of its ego and incompetence, forcing the company to spin off DirecTV and Time Warner in various deals that continue to go badly, just in new incarnations with new names (Time Warner Disney is itself a dumpster fire for the ages).

Don’t feel too badly for AT&T though. Something the NYT doesn’t really mention is how the Trump era in general remained an all time great one for AT&T, which not only got a $42 billion Trump tax cut for doing nothing, it received numerous regulatory favors from the Trump FCC from the gutting of net neutrality and media consolidation rules to the effective lobotomization of the FCC’s consumer protection authority.

The Times does mention how most of the AT&T executives who bungled the disastrous deal received massive cash payouts as “punishment.” But the Times downplays how the megadeal eliminated jobs for more than 50,000 (and counting) employees, and resulted in a generally shittier product for consumers (CNN under Discovery leadership is in the midst of a disastrous bid to shift its coverage from bland and feckless centrism to more right wing authoritarian appeasement and it’s… not going great).

The Times also doesn’t really touch on the fact that mindless consolidation like this happens constantly. Or that U.S. antitrust enforcement is comically broken. Or that the press (including the Times) can routinely be found un-skeptically parroting supposed synergies of such deals pre-merger, helping create the problems they report on. At least we got a post-mortem, which is more than most major press outlets can be bothered to do in a country that treats disastrous, pointless mergers like a national pastime.

Filed Under: antitrust, antitrust reform, competition, consolidation, doj, media, mergers, telecom, trump
Companies: at&t, directv, time warner

DirecTV Ignores GOP Pressure, Kicks OAN Off Its Cable Lineup

Failures

from the performative-gibberish dept

Back in January DirecTV announced it would be kicking the fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of its satellite TV lineup, removing the biggest distribution avenue for the “news” channel.

Despite the endless coverage the channel gets for its baseless conspiracies, it’s a channel relatively few people actually watch. DirecTV executives simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so they simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement when the time came.

OAN, of course, quickly tried to spin itself as a victim of partisan censorship, first by attacking a Black AT&T board member in “news” coverage that pretended DirecTV’s business decision was politically and racially motivated, and then by filing a lawsuit claiming that DirecTV was leveraging its “unchecked influence” as a failing satellite TV company to stifle a “family-run business.”

In the hopes of pressuring DirecTV further, OAN appears to have enlisted the support of six GOP Attorneys General. All six, with Texas AG Ken Paxton in the lead, wrote a letter to DirecTV claiming the channel’s decision was “clearly viewpoint discrimination and an attempt to silence conservative voices.”

Undaunted, DirecTV proceeded anyway and has informed consumers they’ll be losing the channel starting this week:

DirecTV plans to drop One America News Network on Tuesday, ignoring pressure to reverse course from the conservative cable outlet and its supporters.

The satellite TV giant has been notifying customers that it will no longer carry OAN or AWE, a high-end lifestyle channel also owned by Herring Networks Inc., after April 4. 

Again, not that many people watch the channel on a good day. As a struggling satellite TV provider that’s been losing subscribers for several years, DirecTV didn’t find the hassle worth it. Even if DirecTV had kicked the channel to the curb due to its viewpoints, there’s nothing illegal in that. It’s not legally or contractually obligated to carry any channels its executives don’t deem worth the hassle.

So in short, an ordinary business decision was rolled into the Trump GOP’s victimization complex and bunk narrative that they’re being somehow being “censored,” despite the fact you’re able to hear the party’s conspiracy theories everywhere, constantly, ad nauseum. Including on their own platforms and other, more popular, GOP-friendly cable “news” channels.

Much like the attacks on “big tech,” this isn’t really a debate about censorship or the contours of free speech. It’s about authoritarians who believe that private companies (cable and big tech alike) should be mandated to carry the kind of race-baiting, base-agitating propaganda authoritarians resort to when they know shifting demographics and reality aren’t working in their favor.

Filed Under: conspiracy theories, contracts, satellite tv
Companies: at&t, directv, oan, oann

Ted Cruz, Mike Lee Join Dumb, Baseless GOP Quest To Pretend OAN Was Unfairly Censored

Overhype

from the conspiratorial-gibberish dept

So we’ve already noted how OAN was booted off of the DirecTV lineup, severing a massive mainstream distribution avenue for the conspiracy and fantasy channel. DirecTV, recently spun off by AT&T, made the decision because the channel, despite all the attention, really wasn’t being watched very much.

Angry that a major source of GOP propaganda was no longer being pumped into millions of homes, both OAN and the GOP have been engaged in a silly quest to try and pretend that the decision was somehow unfair, censorial, or the result of partisan shenanigans.

First OAN had its anchors attack a Black AT&T board member and former Democratic FCC official, in a bizarre attempt to make it seem like DirecTV’s decision was politically and racially motivated. Then it filed suit against DirecTV, insisting that the dying satellite TV company was using its “unchecked influence and power” (lol) to “unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business.”

Then six GOP AGs piled on, sending a letter to DirecTV accusing the company of trying to censor conservatives. It’s like a big tray of bullshit lasagna.

Now this week, Senators Mike Cruz and Mike Lee have tried their best to get their faces on TV as part of this stage play, penning a latter to AT&T accusing it of participating in a conspiracy with Dominion Voting Systems (which is currently suing OAN for spreading unfounded election fraud claims):

If you cannot see the embedded image, it’s a letter from Lee and Cruz to AT&T’s board of directors and reads as follows:

We write to you with grave concern for the future of journalism and political discourse in America. Specifically, the following facts have come to our attention:

1. One American News Network (“OANN”) is being sued for alleged defamation by Dominion Voting Systems.

2. Dominion Voting Systems is owned by Staple Street Capital.

3. William Kennard is on the executive board of Staple Street Capital.

4. William Kennard is also the Chairman of AT&T’s board of directors.

5. AT&T owns 70% of DirecTV, and controls two seats on DirecTV’s board of directors.

6. DirecTV has decided not to renew its contract with OANN.

These facts raise serious questions about the role of political influence in DirecTV’s programming decisions, as well as whether AT&T’s Chairman has allowed personal financial considerations to influence his oversight of a company in which AT&T holds a majority share–possibly in conflict with his fiduciary obligations to AT&T shareholders.

We request that you respond within 10 business days to the following question: Did any employee or agent of AT&T at any time convey or suggest to any employee or agent of DirecTV an instruction or request not to renew OANN?

We appreciate your urgent attention to this inquiry, and look forward to receiving your prompt reply.

In short, the dynamic duo imply that because William Kennard, the Chairman of AT&T’s board of directors, is also on the board of private equity firm Staple Street Capital (which owns Dominion Voting Systems), this must all be some grand conspiracy to kick OAN off of DirecTV, as if Kennard can single handedly determine all of AT&T’s business proposals by himself.

In reality, OAN was kicked off of DirecTV’s lineup because not that many people watch the channel. DirecTV was spun off by AT&T into a new joint venture with private equity firm TPG Capital, and the new leadership simply didn’t think the profitability to headache ratio was worth renewing a contract. That’s it.

Remember that AT&T not only funded the creation of OAN, reports suggest it came up with the idea. It only backed away from DirecTV because its bungled $200 billion megamerger spree left it desperate for cash. TPG came in, and the focus was obviously on greater fiscal responsibility.

Cable and broadcast executives aren’t the most ethical bunch. As your cable TV channel lineup makes pretty clear, they’ll air any old bullshit provided it makes them money and doesn’t get them into legal hot water. OAN not only wasn’t really particularly popular, its unhinged claims of electoral fraud and obnoxious COVID conspiracies made the channel not worth the trouble, even for them.

Even if DirecTV axed OAN because of its content, there’s nothing illegal there. There’s nothing requiring that DirecTV mandate viewpoint neutrality across its lineup. It’s the company’s prerogative as a business to do business with whoever they’d like, something the Conservative party, you might recall, used to prattle on about at great length about before their noggins were filled with Trump pudding.

An ordinary business decision got distorted into a grand conspiracy by the Trump GOP to agitate their increasingly conspiratorial base and feed the gibberish claim that the modern Trump GOP (whose rants, opinions, and conspiracies can be found absolutely everywhere, all the time) are somehow being unfairly silenced. It’s dumb victimization porn and propaganda all the way down.

Filed Under: cable news, cable tv, conspiracy theories, disinformation, election fraud, gop, mike lee, news, propaganda, ted cruz, trump, tv, william kennard
Companies: at&t, directv, oan, oann

Six Republican AGs Try To Pretend OAN Was ‘Censored’ By DirecTV

Politics

from the traditional-conservative-values dept

Last January DirecTV finally decided to kick fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of their satellite TV lineup, likely dooming the “news” channel. It’s a channel relatively few people watch, and the company simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so DirecTV simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement when the time came.

OAN, of course, quickly tried to spin itself as a victim of censorship, first by attacking a Black AT&T board member in “news” coverage that pretended DirecTV’s business decision was politically and racially motivated. And last week, the company filed a lawsuit claiming that DirecTV was leveraging its “unchecked influence” to stifle a “family-run business”:

“This is an action to redress the unchecked influence and power that Defendants have wielded in an attempt to unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business and impede the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice.”

Trying to claim DirecTV, which itself is losing subscribers hand over fist to streaming, has “unchecked influence and power” is fairly amusing. In reality, DirecTV made a fairly boring business decision to not renew a channel very few people, despite all the sound and fury, actually watch:

Now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has, for some bizarre reason, injected himself into the dispute. In a letter (pdf), Paxton and the GOP AGs of Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina demand DirecTV renew its carriage agreement with OAN, and insist the decision to kick the conspiracy channel to the curb is “clearly viewpoint discrimination and an attempt to silence conservative voices”:

“My fellow attorneys general and I strongly recommend that you reconsider your present course and renew your contract with OAN in April. Your failure to do so will not only cause you to lose millions of dollars in business, but also drive many millions of Americans to simply cancel your services outright, as President Trump and other leading figures have already called for.

I’m old enough to remember that a core GOP platform used to be that government shouldn’t involve itself in routine business decisions without exceptional cause. Yet here, six AGs took the time to take DirecTV to task simply for booting a channel from its lineup that not many people watched.

As with most modern GOP claims of this type, it’s largely performative victimization porn to keep the base angry. What the Trump GOP routinely calls “censorship” is usually just baseline levels of accountability for dumb behavior (like, say, falsely claiming in “news reports” that COVID was created in a South Carolina lab). The real goal here, as it is with the Section 230 fracas, is really to mandate that the internet and cable programming be inundated with alternative reality propaganda favorable to the GOP.

As we’ve noted previously, while AT&T originally funded and came up with the idea for OAN, the company was forced to spin DirecTV off in partnership with TPG Capital, which was likely less interested in catering to conspiratorial GOP gibberish — at least when it wasn’t making them money. Cable and broadcast executives will air anything that makes money if they can legally get away with it.

Even if this was a viewpoint-based decision by DirecTV, there’s absolutely nothing requiring that DirecTV maintain anything resembling “viewpoint neutrality.” There’s just no foundation for any complaint here. There’s nothing illegal. Again, it was a boring business decision made because the channel wasn’t making DirecTV money in ratio with the headaches (like the lawsuits over bogus claims of election fraud).

Paxton and his friends are clearly upset that the ongoing effort to create an entire alternate reality news ecosystem saw a minor setback with OAN being dumped from DirecTV, relegating the channel out of the mainstream and back into a highly competitive scrum of conspiratorial influencers and other gibberish-spewing Trump orbit hopefuls.

Of course, the Trump base will never see alternative viewpoints pointing out Paxton’s involvement here is self-serving, performative bullshit, which is the entire point of the propaganda ecosystem folks like Trump and Paxton are hoping to embolden and protect as they foist their authoritarianism on the planet.

Filed Under: disinformation, gop, ken paxton, lawsuit, propaganda, radicalization, speech, trump
Companies: directv, oan, oann

Cable TV Companies Lost Nearly 5 Million Subscribers in 2021

Broadband

from the too-little-too-late dept

Remember when the cable and broadcast industry insisted that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV subscriptions) wasn’t actually a real trend? Or how, once they finally acknowledged it was a real thing, insisted that it was just a temporary fad that would abate once Millennials started having babies?

Years later and amazingly enough the very real trend shows absolutely no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data from Leichtman Research Group, major U.S. pay TV providers lost 4,700,000 subscribers in 2021. Just slightly less than the 4,870,000 subscribers they lost in 2020.

As has been consistently true in recent years, the losses have been much worse for satellite TV providers (Dish Network, DirecTV) that generally aren’t bundled with broadband in the way cable TV often is:

Top cable providers had a net loss of about 2,695,000 video subscribers in 2021 – compared to a loss of about 1,940,000 subscribers in 2020.

Other traditional pay-TV services had a net loss of about 2,890,000 subscribers in 2021 – compared to a loss of about 3,845,000 subscribers in 2020.

Cable broadband continues to be financially shielded by the fact that the dominant cable TV companies (Charter/Spectrum, Comcast) enjoy a growing monopoly over fixed-line broadband access, with 83 million Americans still living under a broadband monopoly. Said monopoly means they can simply extract any lost TV revenues through things like sneaky fees or bullshit broadband usage caps.

The 7 biggest U.S. cable TV providers now “only” have a grand total of around 41.3 million video subscribers. Consider, for context, that Netflix now has about 37 million in the U.S. alone. And the trend the cable industry spent years trying to deny (in a bid to justify high prices and inflexible cable bundles) continues on with only a very tiny slowdown.

Filed Under: broadband, cable tv, cord cutting, pay tv, satellite tv
Companies: charter spectrum, comcast, directv, dish

Conspiracy Channel OAN Pouts More, Sues DirecTV For Kicking It To The Curb

Legal Issues

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Back in January DirecTV finally decided to axe OAN, the conspiracy and fantasy channel, from its cable lineup. The decision came just three months or so after a blockbuster report showed that AT&T not only helped fund and set up the “news” outlet, but it came up with the idea. OAN has been notorious for spreading false claims ranging from non-existent election fraud to the false claim that COVID was developed in a North Carolina lab as part of a government plot.

OAN didn’t respond well. It first freaked out and had its “reporters” attack a minority AT&T board member in a bid to try and make it seem like the decision was both racial and political. Now OAN has filed a lawsuit against DirecTV, in which it (of course) plays the victim:

“This is an action to redress the unchecked influence and power that Defendants have wielded in an attempt to unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business and impede the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice,”

Accusing DirecTV, the fading satellite TV remnants of AT&T’s bungled media and video ad strategy, as having “unchecked influence and power” is pretty funny just as a baseline. AT&T’s been losing subscribers to streaming hand over fist, and is likely facing a short remaining life span. AT&T/DirecTV didn’t violate its carriage contract with OAN, it simply chose not to renew it, which is its right.

While Dallas-based AT&T executives did originally fund and come up with the idea for OAN, things have shifted dramatically for AT&T and DirecTV since OAN’s creation several years ago. The company’s $200 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner flamed out spectacularly, forcing it to sell much of the assets to recoup its massive debt load as it backed away from its TV and video advertising ambitions and refocused on telecom.

That included selling off DirecTV into a new joint venture with private equity firm TPG Capital, which now has a 30 percent stake. With TPG Capital in the mix the company was simply less tolerant of the propaganda patty cake OAN is playing in ratio with the money they made off the extremely limited number of people that actually watched channel.

In the suit, OAN tries to claim that because OAN and the Herring family of channels still have an ad contract with AT&T’s former ad-arm Xandr (recently sold to Microsoft after AT&T bungled that at as well), it believed its carriage contract would be renewed. But again, there’s nothing illegal here.

As countless other U.S. cable programming makes clear, most cable and broadcast companies couldn’t care less about ethics, and would air pretty much anything they could get away with if it made them money, so the idea that DirecTV was somehow being vindictive or political doesn’t make sense, and OAN’s case doesn’t seem likely to gain much traction.

Filed Under: cable, carriage, channels, disinformation, propaganda, television, tv
Companies: at&t, directv, oan, oann

AT&T/DirecTV Implosion Could Give Apple NFL Sunday Ticket

Failures

from the yeah-that-didn't-work dept

It’s really hard to overstate what a colossal failure AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was. And if you’re an AT&T executive with a bruised ego in the wake of the implosion, the hits just keep on coming.

The megadeals were supposed to cement AT&T as a powerhouse in media and video advertising with HBO and the NFL as cornerstones. Instead, terrible leadership and hubris resulted in more than 50,000 layoffs, the closure of numerous loved brands (Mad Magazine, DC’s Vertigo imprint), the loss of millions of TV subscribers, and a mountain of debt AT&T’s still trying to climb its way out of.

Paying off that debt involved offloading a lot of acquired assets for a song. It has also involved AT&T spinning off DirecTV in a new partnership with private equity firm TPG Capital. One of DirecTV’s flagship properties has been the exclusive deal to distribute out of market NFL games via NFL Sunday Ticket.

But with that deal expiring in 2022, and DirecTV still hemorrhaging cash (not only from the megamerger spree but because of the continued pace of cord cutting), the rights will soon be up for auction. And two of the top suitors for the properties will be Apple or Disney:

Apple is exploring an audacious plan to scoop up the NFL’s available rights with a single, multibillion-dollar deal, sources tell Front Office Sports.

The NFL is currently fielding offers for three assets: an equity stake in NFL Media, the “NFL Sunday Ticket” package for out-of-market games, and livestreaming games on mobile devices. 

Apple wants to bundle them all into one sweeping deal, said sources. That would instantly make the tech giant, which has long avoided sports, one of the NFL’s biggest business partners. 

Again, AT&T’s entry into the media and video ad market was supposed to cement it as the preeminent name in media, sticking it to the traditional tech giants AT&T has long had a fraught relationship with. Instead, AT&T’s still scrambling to get its head above water and companies like Apple and Disney are becoming the very thing AT&T telecom executives dreamed they could be.

Not only does this deal probably bruise the ego of telecom executives that hungrily eyed media expansion but lacked the competency to execute, the broader, more competent distribution of live sports over the internet is likely to only accelerate the cord cutting shift away from traditional TV services (especially services like Dish and DirecTV, which will soon be on life support).

Filed Under: failed merger, football, pay tv, streaming, tv
Companies: apple, at&t, directv, disney, nfl