AT&T Spins Off DirecTV After Losing Billions On Its TV Dreams
from the money-can't-buy-you-love dept
We've noted a few times how giant telecom providers, as companies that have spent the better part of the last century as government-pampered monopolies, are adorable when they try (then inevitably fail) to innovate or seriously compete in more normal markets. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new ad media darling, for example, has been a cavalcade of clumsy errors, missteps, and wasted money.
AT&T has seen similar issues. Under former CEO Randall Stephenson, AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on mergers with DirecTV and Time Warner, hoping this would secure its ability to dominate the pay TV space through brute force. But the exact opposite happened. Saddled with so much debt from the deal, AT&T passed on annoying price hikes to its consumers. It also embraced a branding strategy so damn confusing -- with so many different product names -- it even confused its own employees.
As a result, AT&T intended to dominate the pay TV space, but instead lost 8 million pay TV subscribers since early 2017. Hoping to buy itself a little financial breathing room, AT&T has been shopping DirecTV around for months. But with few suitors interested in paying for a traditional satellite TV provider in the middle of a cord cutting revolution, AT&T instead last week settled on spinning off DirecTV and the rest of its pay TV operations into a new company. Under this new structure, AT&T will retain a 70% majority stake, with the other 30% being owned by private-equity giant TPG.
As part of the deal, AT&T valued the new DirecTV at around $16.2 billion, a massive loss from the $67 billion (including debt) AT&T paid for DirecTV back in 2015. AT&T begrudgingly admitted in a statement this wasn't a particularly impressive feat:
"With our acquisition of DirecTV, we invested approximately $60 billion in the US video business," AT&T said in materials distributed to reporters. "It's fair to say that some aspects of the transaction have not played out as we had planned, such as pay TV households in the US declining at a faster pace across the industry than anticipated when we announced the deal back in 2014. In fact, we took a $15.5 billion impairment on the business in 4Q20."
The deal buys AT&T a little financial leeway (immediately countered by its recent huge payout to grab additional wireless spectrum), but does little to change the underlying equation in AT&T's attempt to dominate video. One of the bigger ironies is that AT&T spent countless man hours and millions in lobbying to grease the regulatory skids for its domination of television, be it the repeal of net neutrality, all the efforts to kiss up to the Trump administration, or the long legal battle over the anti-competitive impact of its Time Warner deal.
Yet all that money, energy, and political power couldn't buy AT&T the kind of innovative chops needed to make inroads in the TV sector in the way they'd originally intended. It would be funny if not for the 54,000 AT&T employees laid off since 2017 in a bid to help manage megamerger debt. There was a real human cost to AT&T's ambition that the press, more interested in hyping pre-merger "synergy" claims than tracking the deal's actual impact, usually can't be bothered to talk much about.
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Filed Under: satellite tv, telcos, tv, wasted money
Companies: at&t, directv
Reader Comments
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"pay TV households in the US declining at a faster pace across the industry"
Interesting phrasing. I suppose it depends on what you term as "pay TV". The people using Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Hulu, etc. seem to be paying for TV and that market is increasing rapidly across that same time period.
"a faster pace across the industry than anticipated"
Than YOU anticipated (again, accounting for definition of "the industry". Everyone else seemed to be quite aware of the trends at the time you started the deal, hence the constant mocking.
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Re: semantics
Pay TV is just industry jargon for cable. Streaming is usually called SVOD or (if ad supported AVOD).
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Unfortunately, if AT&T suffers, they will just get bailed out or buy some legislation to make google pay them a stripend or something
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Bad timing , they bought a satellite TV network
just as consumers are cutting the cord and switching to streaming TV apps and free TV
services
This will go down as one as the most expensive deals in history
It seems direct TV was extremely overpriced
en z sees pay TV satellite as a relic from the 80s
They watch TV on tablets phones game consoles or smart tvs
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Re:
They would not read the writing on the wall.
Perhaps instead, we will see on a pedestal in the broadband desert:
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I was told there would be synergies
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Re:
Now Anonymous, don't be greedy, let's pass it along and make sure everyone gets a synergy.
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Re: Re:
They only get a synergy if they pivot some paradigms fast enough.
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lightbulb moment
THIS IS WHY THEY SUCK SO BAD!
They forgot they are just supposed to be a phone company.
I mean they can't even do that well and here they are pretending they can compete in a marketplace where consumers are actually listened to about what they desire...
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Out of sight, out of mind
This is merely a way to hide the bigger problems ahead from its shareholders. As Bloomberg's Tara Lachapelle noted:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-25/at-t-ditches-directv-to-make-room-for- 5g-streaming-debt
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I suspect that the money lost wont matter because most, if not all, would have been given as tax breaks or some other funding from public money, authorised by corrupt politicians who are on AT&Ts payroll! Therefore, no loss, no problem!
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Re:
Don't forget all the infrastructure that they already have that they got with that past public money that they now control access to. Just up the price for using it to whatever they want, what are people going to do? Get the government to gift them billions and make their network running parallel to AT&T?
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Lowball bid
I sent in a bid of $100 plus assumption of debt to take the entire DirecTV thing off their hands. I figured at the very least I could get a tax credit out of it. Plus free TV. I didn't get a response.
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If att gets shot in the back of the head by its own dealings it’s it own problem
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