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AT&T Television Businesses

AT&T's Massive TV Losses Continue as Another 900,000 Customers Flee (arstechnica.com) 103

Posted by msmash from the cord-cutters dept.
AT&T lost another 897,000 premium TV subscribers in Q1 2020, as the DirecTV owner's string of massive customer losses continued. An AT&T executive today said the company is moving ahead with a company-wide cost-cutting program. From a report: AT&T's earnings announcement today said the 897,000-customer net loss reduced the total number of premium TV subscribers to 18.6 million. AT&T said the latest customer loss was "due to competition and customers rolling off promotional discounts as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."
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AT&T's Massive TV Losses Continue as Another 900,000 Customers Flee More

AT&T's Massive TV Losses Continue as Another 900,000 Customers Flee

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  • "AT&T said the latest customer loss was due to consumers realizing that they could 'cut the cord' and save 50% on TV viewing costs."
    Oh, wait. They did not say that.
    So, they are lying or stupid.
    Pick one.

    • Re:Cut the Cord (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @05:29PM (#59977572)
      Television is on its way out, not because of cost, but because of content.

      AT&T cant make FOX/MSNBC/CNN/etc shape up.
      AT&T cant make MTV/A&E/Discovery/SyFi produce something other than reality TV and low-grade conspiracy/alien/ufo/ice fishing documentaries.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Streetlight2 ( 6512750 )
        Or the History Channel show history. Instead, something about aliens and people rooting through old piles of junk,

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

          Not to mention the never-ending "Chicken scratch on some first century latrine demonstrates Jesus was the Son of God" garbage.

          • Why do channels like History need to sink this low? Are they trying to compete with the Lowest Common Denominator garbage being passed around by the uneducated masses on Facebook?

              If I am going to pay money (and still be tracked one way or another), I expect quality, educational content. Otherwise I might as well save my money and shlep up the garbage on FB.

            • It got them more viewers.

              • So basically profit and fuck everything else. As long as people can stay dumb and they get their chocolate ration.

                Empires fall this way.

                • It's just a television channel. It's the same reason why Court TV became Tru TV. History Channel actually has a legit History Channel (H2, though it may have some dreck as well) where you can go to watch programming somewhat-similar to what used to be on the old History Channel.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

              Why do channels like History need to sink this low?

              Because it is damned expensive having various people dig through documents, chase down various people to do interviews, schedule interviews with various experts, travel to various places around the world to get footage. Oh and the video is done with top of the line video equipment (the stuff so expensive if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it). Then compile all that into an hour long program that is cohesive from start to finish and engage the viewers (with a remote, it is very easy to change th

              • "These days just show up at one place in Las Vegas, hang out at the store all day long or week, get various footage "

                "I loved the old history channel, there are some of these on youtube. Amazed they would track down former Soviet officers who were on station during a crisis with the Americans and we can hear their own point of view."

                Step back and ponder what you wrote for a moment. This huge drop in quality and content is simply mind boggling.
                I wonder when History started hurting hard for cash? :\

        • Months ago, when they did not offer the SCI channel on my package, the SCI channel actually had some science.

          It popped up on my package (I have option of DirectV or nothing, been on it since '05), and now SCI channel is nothing but crypto-history, nazis, aliens, and faux-exciting mysterious abandoned places.

          Spectrum is coming to the area soon (world's smallest 'wooooo-yeah')

          • "It popped up on my package (I have option of DirectV or nothing, been on it since '05), and now SCI channel is nothing but crypto-history, nazis, aliens, and faux-exciting mysterious abandoned places."

              This explains all of the garbage I have been hearing come out of people's mouths over the past 10 years.

        • Why are there so many discovery, history type channels, that show lame ass "reality" shows? $$$$ Pay someone hardly nothing, to record these clowns with their junk/tattoo/island type shows, or spend a TON of money, researching some event, creating back stories, hiring a cast, crew, writing scrips etc. If people would STOP watching these shows, they would do something else. It's CHEAP to make the "reality" shows, and the ratings are high enough they continue to show them.

          • Exactly this. They are cheap to produce and as long as they can squeeze out "passable" entertainment, they will do it as long as possible.

            They won't ignore the bottom line, though, if they start losing viewers, they will change eventually. Unfortunately there are enough bored idiots out there they can go for 10+ years before people start to get a clue/get sick of their shit.

            The only hope left at the moment is the Smithsonian channel; they are what SCI or History used to be 5-10 years ago, and are still ma

        • How about they show content, instead of what feel like breaks between commercials?

          Last time I saw an episode on the History Channel the format was:

          - announce what is coming up through the episode
          - some content
          - announce what is coming up after the break
          - break
          - announce what went before
          - some content
          - announce what is coming up after the break
          - break

          Rince repeat. By the end of the episode

      • You gotta see Ghost Adventures on Travel Channel. I kid you not. A decade ago, Travel Channel was onto something good with the glorious trio of Andrew Zimmern, Anthony Bourdain, and Adam Richman. But these days, their idea of travel is reduced to a reality show about haunted houses.

        • But these days, their idea of travel is reduced to a reality show about haunted houses.

          Our Glorious Leader's cunning plan to reduce your people to sniveling idiots has triumphed!

      • Well.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @07:22PM (#59977962) Journal

        Television is on its way out, not because of cost, but because of content.

        It's actually both. Because plenty of people love shitty content. All that reality TV is popular for a reason.

        I'd say cost is actually the bigger culprit. Joe and Jane American are largely fine with the Idiot Box. They just don't like paying $250 a month to get it (the usual post-discount prices for the Net-TV-Phone bundles + premium channels).

        The increasing cost of Cable has forced people to go "OK, I like these shows, but not enough to pay THAT much for them".

        • "It's actually both. Because plenty of people love shitty content. All that reality TV is popular for a reason."

            This is because of conditioning. Not many people wanted to be known as a "nerd" or a "know it all" in school, and it sticks throughout adulthood. Usually now the message is "You are just a cog in the machine and you are going to die some day, so why bother?"

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Remember that DEMAND is what drives ALL television content. Without demand, you have no ratings, viewership, or funding. In other words, it wasnâ(TM)t merely âoereality tvâ that killed television. It was the few billion stupid humans who LOVE pretending that someone elseâ(TM)s fake life full of manufactured bullshit, is awesome.

          • "Remember that DEMAND is what drives ALL television content. Without demand"

            But who demanded it? This is more like "The CEO needs to buy a Ferrari and a pony for his daughter for Christmas. So we are going to go cheap, and still make the money we did before and more. We will start shovling our new cheap low grade crap down your throat and you will LIKE it!"

            Youtube is basically a reality TV website, and you can get videos on any subject, no matter how obscure, and without a bunch of 20 somethings interjectin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by thomn8r ( 635504 )
        And probably 30% of the channels are shopping network/infomercials that nobody would ever willingly pay for.

    • I dunno, it's AT&T—do we really need to pick only one?

    • It's also that content providers have made the cost too high but also cheaper.

      Let me explain...

      To get all the movies you used to get for $50, you now must pay $200.
      But.. to get just the 3 channels you do want costs $28.
      You don't get a lot of stuff you *might* like. But you binge Legion and then in a few months change to the next service.

    • Hey, consumers wanted to do that. It took a global pandemic for people to have enough free time to wait on hold to do it.

    • So given the option to change the formula or continue with the same one, they appear to go with the latter? Heck with so many locked indoors, to be losing people now should be even more alarming. In contrast services like Netflix see an increase in viewership.

  • "due to competition and customers rolling off promotional discounts as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

    I haven't seen anything like this since 2001...

  • One of the main reasons they are losing customers, is that every time ATT can they raise the price, add a fee. They really want Directv to go belly up, so they can write if off their taxes. Also some moron there thinks that it will help drive people to their really over priced streaming ATT Tv option. So sad to see a company completely ruin something all in the name of greed.

  • AT&T was purchased by Southwestern Bell in the mid 2000s, who then rebranded themselves as AT&T.
    They've been dropping customers like flies ever since.

    If AT&T is going to survive (and it won't) it needs to provide evolutionary customer service, revolutionary products, and quit raising rates.
    They are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve -- DirectTV consumers leaving proves it.

    E

    • AT&T does not want DirectTV consumers--in 2018 they said they were done launching satellites: https://spacenews.com/directv-... [spacenews.com]

      “I would say that AT&T’s buy of DirecTV had less to do with video distribution and more to do with owning content that they can leverage to drive their direct-to-consumer business,” Wagner said in an interview. “That big piece of content that DirecTV has is NFL Sunday Ticket. So AT&T’s strategy, along with their recent buy of Time Warner, is really to complete the vertical connection between content and the consumer.”

    • Re:American Telephone and Telegraph (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @06:31PM (#59977782)
      While you are correct about SWB rebranding as AT&T I'm not sure what you are on about dropping customers. They still have government mandated monopolies in most states. That's why in most places you only have 2 options for internet (cable or phone company). Never mind that both cable and phone companies no longer have any cable or phone lines but they still benefit from 70 year old laws giving them mostly exclusive rights to municipalities rights of way. Now their hubris led them to think they could double their revenue by adding internet to their cable/phone empire only to find their cable/phone revenue begin to erode BECAUSE the internet provided their customers another vector (streaming) At first they tried to hamstring their competition by throttling. This ultimately failed so they are trying to compete in the streaming arena. AT&T now has DirecTV, [directv.com] Uverse, [att.com] DirectTV/ATT Now, [atttvnow.com] and ATT TV! [att.com] How in tarnation can they hope to have an effective streaming service when you're confusing the hell out of your customer like this. Let alone the employees supporting these services.

  • Maybe that is part of the problem? Or maybe AT&T has poor service... I can believe that too.

  • No sports (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @06:40PM (#59977804)
    Sports was 90% of what was keeping people on cable TV. There's no sports right now, and probably won't be for months and months.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Streaming platforms are still running eSports events and viewership is going up massively.

      If they can retain that after real world sports start up again it could be the end of high priced sports packages. Maybe the sports themselves will move to streaming as well, forced to compete with much lower cost eSports.

      Racing in games is often much more interesting than racing in real life these days. F1 is a good example. Due to the huge sums of money involved it's always the same teams and drivers in the lead and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      Interesting statisic, I don't watch sports, I once had DirectTV or Dish and noticed they had hundreds of sports channels i.e. Hockey101, Hockey102, Hockey103, Hockey104 .... and cable TV was similar in hundreds of dedicated sports channels. And yes I dumped cable TV over a year ago. I wonder if sports watchers are the ones "subsidizing" TV except for OTA. When ATSC 3.0 gets rolling I wonder how that will change the dynamics. I found for much generic television, OTA is reasonable (and don't need to pay month

  • Tremendous (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @06:48PM (#59977838) Journal

    You've got to admit, it's an impressive feat for AT&T to lose almost a million TV subscribers during a time when people are forced to stay at home and have nothing else to do but watch TV.

  • Switched from DTV and AT&T cell service when the Spectrum bundle (internet included) was almost 40% less expensive than what I was paying for all three services. Brought the offer sheet from Spectrum to the local AT&T office to see if they would at least come close, they said no. I said bye. I miss the NHL channel but I still can watch the Red Wings and now I have the Olympic channel for watching different seldom broadcast sports. Some of which I enjoy. If that pricing difference is nation wide that
  • Now that sports are cancelled, why does anyone still pay for TV?

  • The only folks who didn't see this coming are the fools who bought DirecTv in the middle of the cord-cutting revolution.
    They're high paid lemmings who saw everyone else doing it, so they had to do it too.

    The very same fools who gambled ( and lost $4B ) in the failed T-Mobile merger.
    The very same fools who think HBO Max is going to be their Golden Goose. ( It won't )
    The very same fools who think AT&T Tv is going to somehow be the answer to those leaving cable / satellite subscriptions.

    They can't ( or re

  • AT&T owns DirecTV, and it is a spammy piece of crap with too much infomercials and home shopping crap, nobody wants to click through all that when they are just looking for something to watch, i can see why AT&T is hemorrhaging customers
  • It is of course not going to, but the schadenfreude stays.

  • ATT ought to just do what bellsouth used to do (Score:3)

    by voss ( 52565 ) on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:59PM (#59978492)

    No more "promos" just simplified fair pricing and packages. If you want a lower price you commit to 12 months but everyone is paying the same price for that 12 month package both new and existing customers. Its the smoke and mirrors crap that alienates customers. ATT should sell reliablity and reasonable cost, if someone wants more channels sell it to them but dont force it on them.

  • Here's why I did it. (Score:3)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @08:53AM (#59979588)
    I had DirecTV Now and it was pretty good. I could sign into the websites and Roku channels of every content provider I was interested in. Then AT&T bought Warner/Turner, but for some reason I then couldn't log into those services with my DTVN creds anymore. This made no sense, because I was a subscriber of a TV provider that owned the content I could no longer access. DTVN logins were separated from DTV's, and became generally useless.

    Then they changed the name to AT&T TV. Little changed other than the name and logo, or at least that's what I thought until I was forced into a new package that was the same price as the one I started with, but was missing a third of the channels. They even had the nerve to list them as unsubscribed, but were not actually available on any service tier and could not be subscribed to separately.

    The other day, I discovered that the service had been renamed yet again, to AT&T TV Now, my package yet again ceased to exist and had again been replaced by one slightly more expensive. I wanted to dig into this and perhaps yell at someone (catharsis) but discovered that whatever was now called AT&T TV was unrelated to what I had (including my creds) but all the support and account links from AT&T TV Now still went to AT&T TV. At this point, I decided that AT&T did not now and would not ever have its shit together, and I wanted no part of it anymore. After a shocking amount of searching (had to go back to google) I found a customer support number. Posted hours 8AM to Midnight. Of course, this was incorrect and no humans were available at 8PM. I ended up canceling from the website. Despite the account staying live through another month (one decent thing they did was stop charging during the crisis), I immediately signed up for Hulu Live even though it's going to cost me more once I have to transfer HBO.

    TL;DR - AT&T does not have its shit together and is thus not worth doing business with unless you need lines run to an office building or a cell phone. But don't bother calling, they don't have accurate internal phonebooks, so if they have to transfer you to a different department, your call is done.

  • Directv was dying before they began negotiations.
    DTV had already begun the less content for more money path, and was alienating customers on a wholesale basis.

    So what was the carrot? I can't believe the bean counters were wearing blinders.
    They can be counting on morphing it into something else as that will certainly cause more bleeding.
    What did they spend all that money on?
    Kudo's to DirecTV for pulling off a Bill Gates style epic shyster move unloading a turd in exchange for gold.

    I was a customer only becau

  • GO CORD CUTTERS! Kudos!
  • I'd dump any fund that has AT&T in it. I assume losses are forthcoming.

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