Here's a couple of interesting parts of the interview.
So you basically thought you were buying customers, not the satellite industry?
Customers and content relationships, right? Sure enough, we bought DirecTV, within a year we stood up a product called DirecTV Now. Purely over the top, designed for the mobile environment. Within a year, year and a half, we have a million-and-a-half subscribers on that platform. It’s growing nicely. We added another 320-some-odd-thousand last quarter, and what you see in our paid TV business, 25 million subs, been very, very steady.
That’s what you wanted, right? We’re going to replace the satellite customers with the online customers.
We were at 25 million subscribers a year and a half ago. We’re at 25 million subscribers today, but a significant amount of these are an over-the-top platform.
Do you make money from the online customers, or you lose money?
Today, no. Standing up the advertising platform is a key element to this, and plus we really pushed hard to get this platform out there. We just put out a new version of the platform just two weeks ago, with the full DVR capabilities and incredible amounts of stacked content and so forth, and so we’re price and discount, we’re moving that price as we roll this out to more market base. So you get to a place where you start making money on it in the next year, year and a half, so I’m not worried about that.
I love the idea that you’re keeping a very stable, and I believe over time, a growing customer base, but it shifts. It shifts to more streamed over-the-top capabilities, and the ability to monetize advertising on those platforms is exponentially greater than traditional TV platforms.
