AT&T disappointed with offers for struggling DirecTV
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Is AT&T's problem is that they have too many TV services? Isn't one of the reasons they did AT&T TV so that the ones that wanted DTV but couldn't because of line of site? AT&T TV will also allow them to get rid of UVerseTV. They could also add more streams to AT&T TV to match DTV's streams. They could also get rid of AT&T TV Now and have AT&T TV on other devices. AT&T also wants to get rid of AT&T TV Now. They could just have it down to DTV, AT&T TV and HBO Max. Then have DTV and AT&T TV have the same look and feel. They could have AT&T TV, HBO/Max and DTV run out of the same broadcast centers. That way all three could be easily maintained and updated.
Actually, AT&T bought DirecTV at its peak performance. That is why they mistakenly paid top dollar.
The fool who made that decision, Stephenson, is long gone, retired and living like a king. Meanwhile the stockholders got hammered on the deal. The Time Warner acquisition doesn't look so great either.
Spectrum and Charter will never compete as they are the same company
Spectrum is a brand of Charter, like Xfinity is a brand of Comcast and Fios is a brand of Verizon (and licensed to Frontier).The big guys almost never compete against each other. I believe there is a sliver in Florida somewhere where Comcast and Charter (L-BHN) compete, but WOW, RCN and Grande are the major overbuilders, Comcast, Charter, Cox and Altice are peers. In portions of the Dallas area, AT&T is the ILEC and Verizon (now Frontier) is the CLEC. You can get Frontier Fios and AT&T fiber services at the same address.
Subscription tv is dead everywhere...dish has almost lost half its subscriber base
Aren't the Internet streaming services subscription based?
I don't think so. I was there way before and a little after the ATT purchase and don't remember any major shift in churn or customer retention up to the point I retired. I left right before ATT made any changes but in the few years before the purchase, DirecTV management started getting away from human eyes on all channels for quality control and went to automated quality monitoring. When watching TV at home before the automated monitoring I could see a nearly perfect record of no outages or impairments like video freezing, blocking, audio dropouts, etc. It was a service that anyone working there could be proud of.
As the automated monitoring took over I noticed right away little glitches or reoccurring freezing that could go on for hours because the automation cannot catch all this stuff. Most of my friends with DirecTV also noticed this and would call me all the time with complaints. With ATT in charge its seems they don't care as much about quality as the old DirecTV management and it seems quality has degraded further as time goes on.
The reasons DirecTV has lost so many customers could be the quality of service degrading over time plus price increases, unfavorable changes to packages, people unhappy with the streaming services, bad experiences with customer service, changes in advertising and the overall customer satisfaction has chipped away at the customer base. This is just my speculation but there are reasons why DirecTV has lost so many customers and Dish is not affected as bad.
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Dish was as high as roughly 14 million subscriber, now they are down to 8 million, so a loss of roughly 6 million, so still pretty bad.
Was what around 2008? I retired at the end of 2014 (I think) and the push for automated monitoring had started several years before that.
From a percentage perspective Dish has faired worse then Directv losing customers
Interesting, I haven't been comparing the two companies since I left. Maybe DirecTVs losses are not attributed specifically to ATTs negligence and are more of a trend of loosing customers to cable and streaming? There is a lot of data out there and somebody has the answer.
Strange...the link took me to an older article on this topic and now it's going to the new one. Caching issue, perhaps.
There were certainly those who were saying D*'s growth had peaked prior to the AT&T purchase. AT&T didn't necessarily care because they thought they would improve margins by having both Uverse and D* to negotiate with. It doesn't seem to have worked out that way, surprise surprise. As usual MoffettNathanson got it wrong, just like they almost always do. The losses are attributable to the rapid change in the market, the ridiculous cost increases of the past couple of decades at a time of income stagnation, and the rise of online pursuits. How much of each is debatable.
