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AT&T Businesses Television Entertainment

AT&T Kills DirecTV Now Brand Name As TV Subscribers Leave In Droves (arstechnica.com) 73

Posted by BeauHD from the new-name-same-service dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is eliminating the DirecTV Now brand name it uses for its struggling Internet-based TV service. DirecTV Now will become "AT&T TV Now" later this summer, AT&T announced today. DirecTV Now (the future "AT&T TV Now") offers a bundle of linear TV channels, similar to traditional cable or satellite services, and AT&T said its core offering won't be changed. AT&T's 2015 purchase of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV network, doesn't seem to be paying off as AT&T hoped. AT&T launched DirecTV Now -- a stripped-down, online-only version of DirecTV -- in 2016, and it was immediately plagued by multiple outages, unexpected blackouts of live local sports games, and missing channels.

While the technical problems got sorted out, AT&T's subscriber gains were short-lived. As we wrote last week, AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019 after announcing a series of price increases. The 946,000-subscriber loss consisted of a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in AT&T's DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services, as well as 168,000 lost subscribers to DirecTV Now. The losses are much bigger when you look at the past year instead of just the past three months. Including all three services, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2018 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. DirecTV Now subscribers dropped from 1.8 million to 1.3 million in the past year. The report notes that the satellite TV service will still keep the DirecTV name, at least for the time being. AT&T said the actual DirecTV Now service will remain the same despite the name change. "Our DirecTV Now subscribers will simply need to re-accept the terms of service and their streaming will continue as usual without interruption," AT&T said.
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AT&T Kills DirecTV Now Brand Name As TV Subscribers Leave In Droves More

AT&T Kills DirecTV Now Brand Name As TV Subscribers Leave In Droves

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  • Wait (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @08:05PM (#59015128)

    Why on earth didn't they just call it AT&TV

  • If consumers hate something, change the name (Score:5, Funny)

    by glomph ( 2644 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @08:07PM (#59015134) Homepage Journal

    Works every time.

    -sent from my seat on a Boeing 737-8200

    • Works every time.

      -sent from my seat on a Boeing 737-8200

      If you think name changes always work, tell that to JCP, The Shack, The Hut, O.co, Qwikster, and Prince.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Livius ( 318358 )

      Works every time.

      Maybe not every time, but there's nothing that says value and customer service like the "AT&T" name.

    • If consumers hate something, change the name

      As you point out, "works every time".

      I guess it works especially well when you change the name to a brand name even more hated than DirecTV!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      "President Max"

  • I can tell you lots of stories of AT&T's slimebaggery both inside the company and out. They can hell-rot in a fiery pit of maggot-infested dicks.

    • Re: They deserve pain (Score:4, Interesting)

      by presearch ( 214913 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @08:32PM (#59015234)

      Thieves.
      Bought a buy one get one phone. They billed me for both. Every complaint call started over from scratch with being put on hold for 45 minutes, usually ending with a dropped call. They said they would refund, said they never had a bogo offer, said I ordered the two phones separately, even said I only had one phone. They won. In two months, no more contract. Goodbye forever AT&T.
      Shame is, I worked at Bell Labs back when they had integrity. A consistent downhill slide since the â80s.
      Man, they suck. Thieves.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kalpol ( 714519 )
        I had that same dance with them when the internet service rep told me a price and then I was billed another entirely different way higher price. I have different Internet now but unfortunately they're about the only cell service that provides a signal in my house.
    • They're too big to function. They have two streaming-only TV services, apparently unaware that they're competing with themselves. They don't have up-to-date internal phone directories, which you can verify by calling them and being transferred to another department (they'll probably send you to an out-of-service number).

      • They don't have up-to-date internal phone directories, which you can verify by calling them and being transferred to another department (they'll probably send you to an out-of-service number).

        Their internal phone directories are fine. They're transferring you to an out-of-service number intentionally. They don't want to talk to you. Or anyone else, so don't take it personally. Talking to people and actually solving a problem takes time, which ruins the call metrics of the monkey answering the phone, which gets them fired. Transferring you to a bullshit number has no repercussions.

  • Simple solutions (Score:3)

    by uvajed_ekil ( 914487 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @08:30PM (#59015222)
    If simple re-branding solutions like this work, I can save JC Penny and Sears simply by changing their names to JCP and S&R. Surely that'll fool consumers into thinking they offer something new, fresh, and not as broken as before!

    Dear At&T,
    If you HAD subscribers and they are leaving, don't you think maybe you should try expanding or changing the lineup, make mobile apps work correctly, and improve the overall user experience? Current subscribers don't give a damn what you call it as long as it works for them, and them leaving is your a problem that is not cause by your name. No one will say, "Oh, this is called AT&T, so I've got to have it!" Your struggling phone services make that evident.

  • I fell for it (Score:3)

    by chuckugly ( 2030942 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @08:59PM (#59015322)
    I subscribed for a couple months. The reason I quit is simple; they are essentially offering to deliver their Sat TV service via broadband. Sure, they had a few on demand things, but the old ones would drop off pretty fast, so I couldn't (for instance) just wait for a season of a series to complete and then watch the dang thing. I tried it, I think with "The Expanse" IIRC, and before the season was done the first few episodes went away. They completely missed the point of a streaming service. The dish on my roof (this house had 2 before I removed them) wasn't the reason I dropped DirecTv 15 years ago.

    • wait for a season of a series to complete and then watch the dang thing.

      That's what torrents are for.

  • Pyrite @ Gold (Score:3)

    by charlie merritt ( 4684639 ) on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @09:27PM (#59015424)

    I just wonder if it doesn't have to do with bang-for-the-buck. When they raised me from $40/Mo to over $100 I fled. Their product isn't worth half what they charge and yet we debate why they are loosing clients. Pyrite at gold prices will loose you clients every time.

  • NOW fails it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Any branding that inckudes the word "NOW" is doomed to fail.

    Montes v. City of Yakima: https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/montes-v-city-yakima-0

  • those assholes think people want to pay them to fill their TVs with advertising and spammy home shopping channels,

  • Typical ATT fraud (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The line about customers reaffirming terms really jumped out at me. Why should the customer have to do anything but notice that ATT changed their name for a service?

    Easily answered, they will use this to lock in another year.

    ATT is COMPLETELY WITHOUT basic human decency. They tried this with me when a sales person signed me up for the wrong service. I called them and they could correct the error but it would somehow obligate me to two years of that new possibly still flawed sign up. NO thanks.

    ATT DISGUSTING

  • Really, my only gripe with it is that AT&T can't seem to work out licensing with itself. TV Provider logins, when you log into a networks website or stream with your TV provider's credentials, exist for DTVN on some services, but the Turner networks that AT&T now owns don't allow DTVN logins. DTV yes, but not DTVN.

    So, basically the problems with the service are due to AT&T being too big and stupid.

  • Big surprise (Score:4, Insightful)

    by pprboy ( 203649 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @08:28AM (#59016742)

    Anybody who has been in the tech business any length of time knows AT&T f#@*s up everything they buy. Why expect anything different this time?

  • Do they have reasons to believe that people will say "DirecTV Now was an overpriced PoS, but I am sure that AT&T TV Now will give me everything that I always wanted at a reasonable price"? They are just kicking the can down the road.

  • DirecTV Now failed at what it promised (Score:3)

    by daveywest ( 937112 ) on Wednesday July 31, 2019 @10:45AM (#59017352)
    I jumped on the DirecTV Now bandwagon to get an AppleTV cheep. The service was just as good as any other cable provider. Most of the time, things worked, but nothing stand out. Then they started raising prices. Again and again. You don't have the infrastructure in the ground, so this should be cheaper than regular cable. What they missed is most providers are allocating the infrastructure cost across multiple services – especially in ways that affect tax burdens. As a customer, I don't care about your tax structure, but you can't promise a cheaper alternative to cable and then raise my price 3x in just a few months.

    • I did the Apple TV thing, actually gave the service a shot for the three months I'd paid for to get the box.

      It was pretty pointless, I dropped it as soon as the three months were up. It was worth it for the Apple TV, I'd have kept subscribing for a year if they sent me an Apple TV every three months.

      (Cue Bruce Springsteen's 57 Channels And Nothin' On.)

  • I used to be a DTV Now Subscriber. Every time I tried to explain the service to friends and family, they instantly got confused and thought I was using the Satellite based service. The name change will be a good thing to help "normal" consumers differentiate between the two services. That being said, the DVR functionality is abysmal...

  • Does the Chief Marketing Officer really believe that AT&T is a more favorable brand than DirecTV?

    I surely don't see it that way. I generally like the satellite providers (DirecTV, Dish, SiriusXM) more than the landline providers (Comcast, Cox, etc)

    I canceled my subscription at the end of June for 2 reasons.

    1) I wasn't watching it much (the primary reason)

    2) I didn't want to send $50 to AT&T every month.

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