NEW YORK — You’ll no longer need a satellite dish to get DirecTV. Parent AT&T is reaching out to cord cutters with three new streaming video options that are slated to launch in the fourth quarter.
There's DirecTV Now, a stream based service that will work with any Internet capable device that AT&T arranges to host the app; DirecTV Mobile, which is aimed at the consumers who want to watch on their smartphone; and DirecTV Preview, which will let people snack on DirecTV content for free.
“We’re extending a product set that will give the customer some choice and options on how they consume premium pay TV content," John Stankey, the CEO of the AT&T Entertainment Group said in an interview. No dish, set-top box or annual contract will be required.
Stankey would not disclose pricing, except to say that these new deals will be less expensive than current DirecTV bundles. Of course, the new packages won't give subscribers full-scale DVR capabilities, access to "stacked" multiple seasons of a given show or other premium features.
AT&T didn't provide specifics on the nature of content packages either, including the possible availability of DirecTV’s jewel programming asset, NFL Sunday Ticket.
“Because of the nature of our agreement with the NFL, we have some additional work to do to get their consent to include (Sunday Ticket) in the offer. We’d certainly like for that to occur but right now we don’t have a commitment for that to happen,” Stankey says. Rival Verizon has owned the rights to the NFL on mobile.
Without those pricing and content details, it is difficult to judge AT&T’s packages compared to the competition, which would broadly appear to include Dish’s Sling TV service, Verizon’s Go90 and perhaps to a lesser extent, T-Mobile’s BingeOn.
But Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson says, “This feels like the first serious attempt to make video pay for one of these carriers." He says AT&T has the brand and the video assets to make it work.
AT&T is targeting the 20 million U.S. households that don’t currently subscribe to pay TV offerings. Stankey believes the new packages could help AT&T reach customers in homes or apartments who are just starting out in their careers and thus have no established credit.
“There are several offerings in the marketplace today which are often referred to as `skinny bundles’ (like Dish’s Sling service). Our research would suggest that those products have a small application in the market and the primary reason behind it is because (your) definition of what skinny is and (my) definition of what skinny is are two different things. Our approach is that you have broad enough content that is very similar to today’s pay TV experience.“We believe these broader more holistic bundles are actually what has traction in the market.”
AT&T spent $48.5 billion acquiring DirecTV in 2015. While the new plans don’t require you to be an AT&T customer, the company does hope to sweeten the pot for its own wireless customers. Back in January, AT&T announced a $100 a month for unlimited data, talk and text plan on a single smartphone for folks who signed up for DirecTV or AT&T U-Verse TV service. At the end of 2015, AT&T had 137 million mobile subscribers and 45 million video subscribers.
