AT&T to Straddle Cord-Cutting, Standard TV

AT&T to Straddle Cord-Cutting, Standard TV

For the last two years, AT&T has energetically challenged conventional practices in pay TV. Two years ago, the telecom launched DirecTV Now, a streaming video service without cable or fiber lines or a satellite dish. A few months ago, it launched Watch TV, an extremely small and cheap video bundle. Now AT&T is trying what nobody has attempted before: to straddle the gap between ‘cord-cutting’ and the conventional pay TV model.

Last week, the telecom giant announced a market test of a new receiver. This in itself is not unusual; every pay TV system tests new equipment every year. But AT&T has added a twist. Its new receiver is meant to provide what nobody else has thought to offer:

DirecTV Now has sent messages to selected subscribers asking if they’d like to participate in an upcoming beta test of a box due for release in 2019.  The trial is to last about six months.

On November 14, AT&T CFO John Stephens told a media conference what his company expects of the new device. Stephens said: “…instead of rolling a truck to the home, we roll a UPS or FedEx truck… and deliver a self-install device. This allows the customer to use their (sic) own broadband. We certainly hope it’s our own fiber, but it could be anybody’s broadband. And they get the full-service premium package that we would normally deliver off satellite or over our IP-based U-Verse service.”

In other words, AT&T means to offer a service nobody else has: full-service and full-sized pay TV packages without the need for custom installation or proprietary web service. The telecom giant intends to straddle the hitherto massive and seemingly unbridgeable chasm between the conventional and IP TV models.

If AT&T can pull this off, other providers will feel intense consumer pressure to follow. The pay TV industry as we’ve known it will be obliterated, never to return in any resemblance to its current form.

***IP means internet protocol.

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