Chance encounter with an AT&T DirecTV distributor

Tom Paine

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I happened to run into a DirecTV contractor (I assumed he was an independent, as most are), quite by chance this weekend.

When I mentioned to him that AT&T (which acquired DirecTV last year for a mere $49 billion) was acquiring Time Warner for $85 billion, he assumed I meant Time Warner Cable. I explained to him that TWC had been spun off from Time Warner a few years back, and was more recently acquired by Charter.

He seemed even more surprised that AT&T was spending all that money on programming content, like the Cartoon Network.

What really threw him was when I said AT&T was planning to get out of satellite distribution over the next five years or so, and rely on an OTT (over the internet) model. "That's our business," he responded. They serve the rural mountain counties around here where cable companies don't go, and there are few other options. One person I spoke with recently couldn't even get DSL.


Since I didn't mean to upset him, I told him that AT&T probably would make arrangements to continue to serve such customers by satellite, either by itself or by spinning off the rural areas to a separate company, as Verizon has done with its outlying territories.

Unless, I said, AT&T can come up with a robust enough LTE service for areas like that; then all bets are off.