Wonder Woman Forces AT&T & Roku To End Their Petty Squabbles

from the gatekeepers-gonna-gatekeep dept

At the start of this year, AT&T's creatively named streaming app, AT&T TV Now (since renamed HBO Max), was unceremoniously pulled from all Roku streaming hardware after a contract between the two companies expired and they couldn't agree on a new one.

It took more than a year of folks not being able to watch AT&T streaming services for this standoff to finally break, and it required leveraging the strength of Wonder Woman to do so. After being unable to come to an agreement for much of the year, AT&T used its ownership of Time Warner to gain a little leverage on Roku. First, it announced that the anticipated Wonder Woman sequel would be released on Christmas day, but only on HBO Max. Then, it announced a major plan to release most major 2021 theater releases simultaneously on both streaming and in theaters.

As the Wonder Woman 1984 release date approaches, Roku appears to have buckled. The sides this week announced a new deal that will finally bring AT&T's HBO Max to Roku:

"On Christmas Day, the superhero sequel “Wonder Woman 1984” from AT&T’s Warner Bros. will premiere on HBO Max on the same day as in theaters. That heightened the stakes for both HBO Max and Roku. The debut will be the biggest moment yet for HBO Max, a bet that a blockbuster film can boost subscribers at a time when the pandemic has shut down many theaters."

One of AT&T's major asks of Roku and companies like Amazon is that they stop selling access to HBO apps via their streaming platforms, instead shoveling folks toward AT&T's HBO Max platform. After a series of missteps and price hikes (caused by merger mania debt), AT&T lost an astonishing 7 million pay and streaming TV customers in just the last three years. It's now using its Warner Brothers catalog successfully for leverage, given Roku didn't want millions of U.S. consumers waking up on Christmas day wondering why they couldn't watch Wonder Woman with everybody else.

Whether this works out as a broader strategy for AT&T remains to be seen. AT&T's rush to release all Warner Brothers films to streaming has pissed off many mainstream directors like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve, who say the company didn't really share its plan with many folks at Time Warner, didn't give much (any) consideration on how the pivot impacted union employees struggling to survive, and is basically just a stunt to spur AT&T's lagging subscription numbers:

"There is absolutely no love for cinema, nor for the audience here. It is all about the survival of a telecom mammoth, one that is currently bearing an astronomical debt of more than $150 billion. Therefore, even though “Dune” is about cinema and audiences, AT&T is about its own survival on Wall Street. With HBO Max’s launch a failure thus far, AT&T decided to sacrifice Warner Bros.’ entire 2021 slate in a desperate attempt to grab the audience’s attention."

On one hand, releasing films straight to streaming is a good idea given the public health crisis. On the other hand, these directors are right that AT&T's probably the last company on Earth capable of making such a major pivot with nuance or any serious care of craft, given its repeated bumblings so far. Meanwhile it's ironic to watch AT&T, largely a gatekeeping bully in telecom, suddenly face gatekeeper restrictions as it's forced to actually compete. You can expect a lot more standoffs like the AT&T/Roku affair as media and platform giants begin truly flexing their muscles in a bid for platform domination.

Filed Under: streaming, tv, wonder woman
Companies: at&t, roku

Your Slingbox Will Be A Useless Brick In A Few Years

from the you-don't-own-what-you-buy dept

Remember the Slingbox? It was a piece of hardware by Dish subsidiary Sling Media that let users beam TV content from your home cable box to anywhere else. Sling was public enemy number one among entrenched cable and broadcast industry gatekeepers, because its products (*gasp*) not only made life easier on consumers, but at one point integrated ad-skipping technology. Back in 2013 the broadcast and cable industry was so pissed at Sling, it managed to get a best-of-show CES award retracted by CNET and CBS simply because the industry didn't like the disruptive nature of the company's technologies. Ah, memories.

This week, Sling Media announced that all Slingboxes will effectively become useless paperweights in a few years. In a company announcement, it says the technology will no longer work at all as of November 9, 2022:

"Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months after the discontinued announcement date (November 9, 2020), at which point ALL Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable.

Until then, most Slingbox models will continue to work normally, but the number of supported devices for viewing will steadily decrease as versions of the SlingPlayer apps become outdated and/or lose compatibility.

The shift isn't particularly surprising given that the streaming era has effectively made such technology irrelevant. Users can now obtain streams of numerous apps on any platform they like. And software like Plex similarly let users stream content from their home PC anywhere they have a reliable internet connection. Streaming from your home cable box isn't as popular because people are not only cutting the cord at a record pace, they're shifting to streaming platforms that are inherently more flexible. Evolution made Sling irrelevant. The company kind of explains this all to users, but not really:

Q: Why is Slingbox being discontinued?

A: We’ve had to make room for new innovative products so that we can continue to serve our customers in the best way possible.

Q: Will Slingbox be releasing any new products?

A: No.

At the same time, it's yet another example of how in the modern era, you simply don't really own the things you buy. Firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation 3. And with everything now relying on internet-connectivity, companies can often give up on supporting devices entirely, often leaving users with very expensive paperweights as we saw after Google acquired Revolv, then bricked users' $300 smart home hub. Now it's the Slingbox's turn to head to that great gadget graveyard in the sky.

Filed Under: brick, end of life, ownership, slingbox, streaming, tv
Companies: sling media

Comcast Tells Customers They May Lose Access To Comcast Channels If Comcast Can't Agree With Comcast

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

Comcast is informing the company's 20+ million cable TV customers that they may lose access to Comcast TV channels next month if Comcast can't come to some sort of agreement with... Comcast.

It's an absurd twist on the already annoying practice of carriage disputes, where customers pay the price for broadcasters and cable TV providers being unable to come to terms on new agreements after old ones expire. Usually, this involves both the cable company and the broadcaster trying to get customers pissed at the other guy, despite both sides pursuing relentless rate hikes (be it for programming or cable set top box rental). Usually this results in outages that customers don't get refunds for, after which a new confidential deal is struck and consumer prices go up anyway.

While there have been some flimsy discussions about protecting consumers from these kinds of stand offs, not much comes of them. Matthew Keys notes how this particular standoff effectively involves Comcast bickering with itself (Comcast NBC Universal):

"But the Comcast situation is unusual because the cable giant owns NBC Universal and the channels that are slated to be dropped. The channels are carried under an agreement negotiated between the cable service and its subsidiary broadcast and cable network group.

“Comcast has successfully renegotiated thousands of expiring contracts over the years and rarely experienced an interruption of service,” a statement included with the notice said. “However, it is possible that contracts for the channels listed below will not be renewed, in which case Comcast would no longer have the right to carry those channels on our systems."

Needless to say, it's pretty likely that Comcast will be able to agree with Comcast before Comcast customers lose access to channels they pay for. And the notice was created because cable providers are legally obligated to inform customers of looming blackouts when a new contract hasn't been signed yet. But I think Cory Doctorow does a good job getting to the heart of this absurdism by noting its origins lie in trying to pretend that monopolistic business sectors are more competitive than they actually are, and creating the illusion that monopolies are good and efficient:

He also quite correctly notes that the performative nonsense (and unnecessary stress placed on the backs of customers during an already stressful time) is generated by a need to create the illusion of competition, but also to help set the rates Comcast gets to charge other, largely unaccountable media giants:

Either way, these fights have been getting increasingly worse over the last decade, with consumers routinely losing access to TV content they pay for -- and almost never getting a refund. Regulators in the Trump era effectively giving up on consumer protection hasn't helped. And while the added competition from streaming has helped matters somewhat, you can expect entirely new issues as the battle over gatekeeper dominance simply changes shape.

Filed Under: carriage disputes, tv
Companies: comcast

AT&T Is Taking An Absolute Bath On Its DirecTV Merger

from the synergies dept

So 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 CEO Randall Stephenson, AT&T spent more than $175 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 lost 3,190,000 pay TV subscribers last year alone and roughly 7 million since 2018. Not exactly the kind of "domination" the company envisioned. Despite a $42 billion tax break from the Trump administration for literally doing less than nothing (42,000 layoffs, in fact), AT&T's now being forced to consider low ball offers for DirecTV after investors finally got tired of the company's merger-mania. As such, a company that was acquired for $67 billion (including debt) in 2015, is likely to be sold for less than a third of that:

"The telecom giant last week invited a handful of suitors into the second round of an auction of the struggling satellite-TV broadcaster, even though first-round bids had valued DirecTV at well below $20 billion, The Post has learned.

Opening bids from a coterie of buyout firms came in at around 3.5 times DirecTV’s roughly $4.5 billion of Ebitda, implying a valuation at around $15.75 billion, according to a source close to the process."

A lot of experts told AT&T it was silly to buy a satellite TV provider on the eve of the cord cutting revolution. As such it's kind of surprising to see that AT&T insiders are surprised by any of this:

"It is very, very surprising they would sell DirecTV at such a low price — that’s a serious destruction of value,” said a former AT&T executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

An AT&T spokesperson declined to comment."

AT&T bought a company based on antiquated tech, integrated it into a confusing array of befuddling, discordant brands, then tried to make consumers pay off the debt in the form of relentless price hikes at the peak of a massive paradigm shift in television where price matters more than ever. Yeah, totally surprising how that didn't work out.

Filed Under: cord cutting, randall stephenson, satellite tv, tv
Companies: at&t, directv

AT&T Now Trying To Ditch DirecTV After Bungled Merger Spree

from the told-you-so dept

It wasn't supposed to go this way.

AT&T purchased DirecTV in 2015 for $67.1 billion (including debt). The company then gobbled up Time Warner in 2018 for a cool $86 billion. Together, these deals were supposed to cement AT&T as a dominant player in the video advertising wars to come. Instead, they created a convoluted mess that resulted in a mass exodus of pay TV subscribers. In fact, a combination of bungled integration, massive debt, price hikes, and confusing branding have resulted in AT&T losing 7 million subscribers since 2018. That's obviously not the kind of M&A fueled sector domination AT&T executives like Randall Stephenson (since "retired") envisioned.

Now AT&T is reportedly trying to offload DirecTV entirely:

"AT&T Inc. is seeking private equity investors to buy the majority of its DirecTV satellite-television business, helping it cope with a major drag on its operations, according to people familiar with the situation. Such a move could let AT&T remove DirecTV from its books while potentially still giving it access to some of the cash flow, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private."

Many investors balked at AT&T's 2015 plan to acquire a satellite TV provider on the eve of the streaming video and cord cutting revolution. AT&T stumbled forward anyway. Ultimately, AT&T attempted to pay off the debt load created by its M&A mania by raising prices on consumers, despite promising antitrust regulators that wouldn't happen. Those already price-sensitive customers then simply flocked to more affordable alternatives AT&T was trying to compete with in the first place. AT&T's confusing array of differently branded streaming efforts didn't help matters.

In mid-2018, AT&T had roughly 25.45 million pay TV subscribers across all of its TV services, including its IPTV service (formerly U-Verse), DirecTV, and its creatively named "AT&T TV" streaming platforms. As of last quarter, AT&T had just 18.41 million pay TV subscribers.

Even massive handouts from the Trump administration haven't helped the telecom and media giant. Both the deregulation at the FCC (repealing net neutrality, killing FCC broadband privacy rules, weakening overall FCC regulatory authority) and the $42 billion AT&T received from the Trump tax cuts were supposed to "drive investment" and boost employment. Instead, AT&T has laid off 41,000 employees since 2017 and dropped its overall 2020 CAPEX by around $3 billion.

Aren't mindless megamerger "synergies" and utterly captured regulators an amazing sight to behold?

Filed Under: failures, mergers, statellite tv, tv
Companies: at&t, directv

AT&T Loses Another 1 Million TV Customers As Cord Cutting (And Greed) Take A Toll

from the not-the-sort-of-death-star-we-planned dept

2019 saw a record number of consumers ditch traditional cable television. 2020 was already poised to be even worse, and that was before a pandemic came to town. The pandemic not only sidelined live sports (one of the last reasons many subscribe to traditional cable in the first place), it put an additional strain on many folks' wallets, resulting cord cutting spiking even higher.

Among the hardest hit continues to be AT&T, whose customers have been fleeing hand over fist even with AT&T's attempt to pivot to streaming video. According to AT&T's latest earnings report, the company lost yet another 954,000 pay TV subscribers -- 886,000 from the company's traditional DirecTV and IPTV television offerings, and another 68,000 customers from the company's creatively named AT&T TV Now streaming video platform. All told, the losses left AT&T with 18.4 million video customers, including both Premium TV and AT&T TV Now, down from nearly 25.5 million in mid-2018.

That's a fairly amazing face plant for a company that spent more than $150 billion on megamergers (DirecTV in 2015, Time Warner in 2018) in a bid to dominate the pay TV sector. The problem is the deals saddled AT&T with an absolute mountain of debt, which the company then attempted to extract from its customers in the form of relentless price hikes. During an economic crisis and pandemic:

"Higher prices helped drive the customer losses. As it has in past quarters, AT&T said its practice of giving out fewer promotional-pricing deals contributed to the customer losses for AT&T TV Now. AT&T said the Premium TV loss was "due to competition as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

While AT&T executives are trying to pretend this was all part of some master strategy to only retain higher-revenue subscribers, this is absolutely not the sort of sector domination company executives originally envisioned. The entire point of releasing a cheaper streaming TV service is to lure cost-conscious customers fleeing traditional cable. Raising rates relentlessly sort of defeats that purpose. The company also managed to shoot itself in the foot with such a bizarre array of discordant TV brand offerings, it, at one point, managed to confuse the company's own employees.

Even AT&T's investors (who usually adore megamergers) balked at the company's spending spree and sloppy execution, and for months rumors have indicated that AT&T could wind up selling DirecTV for a pittance. Overall, just another day for a telecom and media sector that's utterly obsessed with mindless merger mania and growth for growth's sake, even when it makes absolutely no sense.

Filed Under: competition, cord cutting, fees, john stankey, tv
Companies: at&t

Old School TV Gatekeepers (AT&T, Comcast), Struggle With Modern Streaming Gatekeepers (Amazon, Roku)

from the meet-the-new-boss... dept

In years past, incumbent broadband and television giants like Comcast and AT&T enjoyed life from a comfortable position of dominance. If you want to subscribe to broadband, such companies are often your only option. If you wanted to subscribe to television service, you were required to rent a locked down, highly proprietary cable box courtesy of the industry's cable hardware monopoly. Want to have your cable channel in a conspicuous position in the lineup? You could also expect headaches.

As such, it's interesting to watch how these giants of yesterday are now struggling to adapt to a new era in which their interests are not the end all, be all of negotiations.

As AT&T tries to reverse the tide of TV customer defections, it has turned to the launch of yet another streaming service: HBO Max. But the company's efforts haven't gone as planned, with the service unavailable on two of the most dominant TV streaming hardware platforms (Roku and Amazon) due to contract disputes. AT&T, a government pampered giant that traditionally enjoys playing the role of the politically powerful bully (remember net neutrality?), hasn't been able to break this logjam despite HBO Max having launched a month ago:

"But streaming is an entirely new battlefield, with platforms like Roku and Fire TV becoming the main distributors. And legacy media companies like WarnerMedia and Disney are streaming newcomers with everyone seeking to challenge Netflix. None of the three companies would comment on the state of talks or say what the current impasse is over. Analysts agree that it probably harms HBO Max as it seeks to find its footing more than Roku and Amazon, which have built their businesses and subscriber bases over the past few years."

Comcast, despite all of its money, political influence, and power, is running into the same problem. The company's upcoming new streaming service, Peacock, also won't be launching on Roku (39% market share) or Amazon (30% market share) streaming hardware. It's a disadvantaged position AT&T and Comcast certainly aren't quite used to:

"Combined, Roku and Amazon have around 70 percent of the streaming TV-specific hardware market. Both companies have leveraged their market dominance to try to secure distribution deals on terms that are favorable to them. Those deals include data-sharing agreements and the right to sell subscriptions to streaming services to viewers natively through Roku and Amazon’s operating system, according to individuals familiar with the matter."

There are different negotiations hangups for both AT&T and Verizon. The AT&T and Roku standoff purportedly centers around AT&T being unwilling to let Roku customers who've already paid for HBO via Roku (who gets a cut) access AT&T's HBO Max app (read: AT&T doesn't want middlemen getting a cut). The Roku and Comcast standoff, in contrast, allegedly is focused on a dispute over advertising and access to viewer tracking data. In both instances, dominant monopolists are now being forced to compromise as they attempt to pivot to disruption... and at least so far, it's not going particularly well.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, gatekeepers, streaming, tv
Companies: amazon, at&t, comcast, roku

AT&T Ditches $15 TV Service It Used As Regulator Bait To Seal Time Warner Merger

from the history-repeats-itself dept

You may be shocked to learn this, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.

The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.

Last week, yet another AT&T promise disappeared without much fanfare or notice. Ahead of the Time Warner merger, AT&T promised regulators the deal would directly culminate in the release of a cheaper, $15 per month TV service dubbed AT&T Watch. This $15 service was highly promoted not only in AT&T filings, but during its court defense of the merger by the CEO himself:

"Watch" will be different because it will not include any sports channels. This will enable AT&T to sell it for $15 a month, compared to $35 a month for DirecTV Now. Stephenson brought it up on the stand in the context of AT&T's streaming businesses. He testified that AT&T does not want to stop innovation in streaming services and brought up the new skinny bundle.

But with the deal approved, it didn't take long for AT&T's discount offering to disappear. By last fall, AT&T had begun backpedaling on the offer, and last week announced it would be discontinuing the offer entirely. Only a handful of reporters in the space (like Jared Newman) correctly called the promotion out as bullshit from the start:

"The whole thing was an obvious PR ploy from the start, and now with the acquisition fading into the rear view, there’s little reason to keep the service going any longer. The company never got around to adding Roku support for Watch TV, and it stopped giving the service away with unlimited data plans last October. Those who want to get a streaming TV service from AT&T can turn to one of its broader and more expensive packages instead—with prices starting at $55 per month.

Irony being that due to incompetence, AT&T's grand merger ambitions (or its lobbying assault on net neutrality) didn't even actually help it dominate the TV space, at least not yet. The mergers saddled AT&T with so much debt, the company immediately turned around and imposed rate hikes. Those hikes, in turn, drove TV customers to the exits by the millions, since the whole point of "cutting the cord" is to get away from ridiculously bloated cable TV bills. It's part of the reason that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is now an ex-CEO, somewhere napping on a giant pile of money.

In short, much like the $42 billion tax cut AT&T nabbed from the Trump administration (that resulted in 41,000 layoffs), AT&T made a long list of promises that wound up being completely hollow. This was all laid out to US District Judge Richard Leon during the merger trial, yet Leon still ignored all of the warnings and rubber stamped the deal without a single condition. At absolutely no point did Leon in his absurd ruling recognize the threat of AT&T owning both a monopoly over broadband and a massive media empire in charge of content needed by competitors (who also were quickly subjected to price hikes).

All of this was obvious to anybody that has paid attention to the fact that AT&T has a thirty year history of making all manner of promises in exchange for deregulation, tax cuts, regulatory favors, and merger approvals that almost universally wind up being complete bullshit. But like the last dozen or so times we've been through this, absolutely nobody on any level of government will try to hold AT&T accountable, lest they put campaign contributions in jeopardy.

Filed Under: at&t watch, competition, merger, promises, tv
Companies: at&t, time warner

New AT&T CEO Says You're A Moron If You Don't Use AT&T Streaming Services

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

Last week AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stepped down after his $150 billion bid to dominate the video advertising space fell flat on its face. Stephenson's tenure was plagued by no shortage of scandals, though it was his failures on the TV front that likely cost him his comfy seat as one of the highest paid executives in America.

After spending $150 billion on several dubious megamergers (most notably the 2015 purchase of a satellite TV provider DirecTV), Stephenson saddled the company with an ocean of debt. So much debt it was forced to raise rates on customers in the middle of one of the biggest transformational shifts in the TV sectors in decades (cord cutting and the rise of streaming video). And while Stephenson deserves credit for at least trying to get out ahead of the trend, his tenure was pockmarked by a long line of dubious decisions that directly contributed to the company losing more than 3.2 million pay TV subscribers last year alone.

But Stephenson's replacement, AT&T executive John Stankey, doesn't seem much better. In a profile piece last week, Bloomberg described fairly idiotic and cocky recent comments by Stankey as "blunt." Among them was the claim that "nobody knows as much about TV as me," and the insistence that those who don't subscribe to AT&T's confusing assortment of discount TV streaming services must certainly be stupid:

"When pitching AT&T’s new HBO Max streaming platform, he told the audience that anyone unwilling to pay $15 a month for the service had a low IQ. At a town hall with HBO employees last year, Stankey said the network had to dramatically increase its programming output, comparing the work ahead to childbirth. Once, when a Time Warner veteran criticized an idea during a meeting, Stankey replied, “I know more about television than anybody."

Yeah, sounds like just the guy to right the ship, and earn employee and customer respect. Especially for a company plagued with no shortage of hubris that believed it could just bully, bullshit, and bribe its way to industry domination.

One of the major reasons Stephenson was ejected was courtesy of recently hyperactive hedge fund Elliott Management, which holds a massive stake in AT&T. Elliott complained that Stephenson had become megamerger happy and, despite eliminating 37,000 jobs to recoup merger debt (despite billions in regulatory FCC favors and a $42 billion Trump tax cut) wasn't doing enough firing. Reports now suggest that Elliott didn't much like Stankey either, but settled on him after external options proved even more underwhelming:

"Elliott, the hedge fund run by Paul Singer, remains skeptical of incoming CEO John Stankey’s decision-making but has decided his understanding of AT&T’s sprawling assets makes him a better candidate to take over for Stephenson than any external candidate, according to the people...Elliott was skeptical of Stankey’s decision-making as an architect of AT&T’s acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner. It advocated that AT&T focus on divesting assets and lowering debt, pushing the largest U.S. wireless company to sell DirecTV, one of the assets Stankey has steadfastly defended."

In short nobody in this drama seems to know what they're actually doing. Few were happy with AT&T's previous leadership. And few seem happy with AT&T's new leadership, who apparently thinks he's a TV sector super genius, and you're a moron if you don't subscribe to AT&T's generally underwhelming TV offerings. Surely this will all go swimmingly.

Filed Under: john stankey, randall stephenson, streaming, tv
Companies: at&t

AT&T CEO Steps Down After Bungled, Megamerger-Fueled TV Failure

from the well-that-didn't-go-well dept

So 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 CEO Randall Stephenson, AT&T spent more than $150 billion on mergers with DirecTV and Time Warner, hoping this would secure its ability to dominate the pay TV space. 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 lost 3,190,000 pay TV subscribers last year alone. Not exactly the kind of "domination" the company envisioned.

Stephenson's failures on this front were so pronounced, even the company's investors got angry about how much money AT&T spent on questionable mergers. And late last week, Stephenson himself announced (not coincidentally) he'd now be retiring, though AT&T's farewell letter understandably addresses none of these recent headaches:

"Randall has done an outstanding job as CEO in transforming AT&T into a leader in communications, technology, and media and entertainment. His strong leadership and strategic investments during a period of unprecedented customer demand for mobile communications and premium entertainment have positioned the company extremely well for the years ahead. We look forward to Randall continuing to lead the Board and working with John to ensure a smooth leadership transition."

Until now, it's only AT&T customers and employees who had to pay the price for Stephenson's missteps. You'll recall AT&T received a whopping $42 billion in savings from the Trump tax cuts, promising a universe of new jobs and investment in return. In reality though, AT&T has laid off some 37,000 employees and slashed its 2020 CAPEX by some $3 billion as it attempts to dig out from under the mountain of debt Stephenson's merger ambitions helped create.

Stephenson, who pulled in $32 million in compensation last year despite his TV face plant, spearheaded no shortage of other controversies during his tenure. Like that time his top lobbying and policy man, Bob Quinn, was busted paying $600,000 to Trump "fixer" Michael Cohen to gain additional access to the President. Or AT&T's lobbying attack on net neutrality, privacy rules, and the FCC in general, which netted AT&T billions in regulatory favors, to be sure, but pissed off the majority of Americans -- especially the part involving ample fraud and identity theft by K street firms employed, in part, by AT&T.

Under Stephenson's watch AT&T has also been: fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired, fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families, and fined $105 million for helping "crammers" by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills. And that's before you get to the fines AT&T had to pay for failing to secure sensitive user wireless location data.

Ah, memories! Stephenson't replacement, John Stankey, is being lauded by the press as "blunt" for statements such as these:

"When pitching AT&T’s new HBO Max streaming platform, he told the audience that anyone unwilling to pay $15 a month for the service had a low IQ. At a town hall with HBO employees last year, Stankey said the network had to dramatically increase its programming output, comparing the work ahead to childbirth. Once, when a Time Warner veteran criticized an idea during a meeting, Stankey replied, “I know more about television than anybody."

Great. Good luck with that.

Filed Under: john stankey, randall stephenson, telco, tv
Companies: at&t