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AT&T Television

AT&T Kills Off the Failed TV Service Formerly Known As DirecTV Now (arstechnica.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD from the good-riddance dept.
AT&T is killing off the online-video service formerly known as DirecTV Now and introducing a no-contract option for the newer online service that replaced it. Ars Technica reports: AT&T unveiled DirecTV Now late in 2016, the year after AT&T bought the DirecTV satellite company. Prices originally started at $35 a month for the live-TV online service, and it had signed up 1.86 million subscribers by Q3 2018. But customers quickly fled as AT&T repeatedly raised prices and cut down on the use of promotional deals, leaving the service with just 683,000 subscribers at the end of Q3 2020. In 2019, AT&T changed the name from DirecTV Now to AT&T TV Now, creating confusion among customers and its own employees because the company simultaneously unveiled another online streaming service called AT&T TV.

AT&T TV was pitched as a more robust replacement for satellite TV, and it even mimicked cable and satellite by imposing contracts, hidden fees, and a big second-year price hike. Going forward, AT&T TV Now will no longer be offered to new customers, and AT&T TV will be the flagship for AT&T's live-TV streaming business. "AT&T TV Now has merged with AT&T TV," the service's website says in an update flagged in a news article by TV Answer Man yesterday. For existing users, "AT&T TV Now customers' service and plans remain in effect" without any changes, an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. "We have no other price changes to announce at this time."
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AT&T Kills Off the Failed TV Service Formerly Known As DirecTV Now More

AT&T Kills Off the Failed TV Service Formerly Known As DirecTV Now

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  • AT&T TV not available to DIRECTV and U-verse T (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:30PM (#60941074)

    AT&T TV not available to DIRECTV and U-verse TV customers. Restrictions apply.

    • Re:AT&T TV not available to DIRECTV and U-vers (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:39PM (#60941114)
      A VPN costs $3/month, and a torrent client is free.

      ARRRR its the best online video subscription I've ever had.

      • VPNs don't usually have 6Mb to let you watch fullscreen HDTV. If you already have TV by AT&T, then this is redundant.

      • and you can torrent live sports and news?

        • Fuck your sports (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You knuckledraggers and your goddamned sports are why cable is fucked and will stay fucked. Turn off that trash.

          • Fuck you (Score:4, Insightful)

            by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @07:57AM (#60942580) Journal

            Why do you give a shit what other people like to watch with their own time and resources?

            Cable is fucked and will stay fucked because cable companies are still clinging to a grossly outdated 40-year-old content distribution model. I don't know why they haven't converted everything to an on-demand IP video stream years ago, and turned every hertz of spectrum available on that coax cable to bonded packet-switched data channels.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              There are enough people who won't switch to cheaper streaming options and will instead just keep paying ever higher cable prices.

              • Old people and people that live in really rural areas where sat is their only real option. Now youd think those rural people were hillbillies, but I have seen some pretty enormous mansions in the middle of nowheresville. 8000sq foot homes with a detached barn/garage that is another 1200sq ft all of it hvac. All sitting on anywhere from 20-100 acres of land. Some of them are so off the beaten path that cell coverage is somewhat spotty also.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              Why do you give a shit what other people like to watch with their own time and resources?

              I don't give a shit what you watch, I give a shit that I am paying for it via a "regional sports fee" on my bill.

              • You're not paying shit for what I watch, because I don't subscribe to cable.

                I'm also not an insufferable git who tries to force my opinions on other people.

                Watch it or don't, I don't give a shit. Just like you don't give a shit what I watch according to your post. But you still seem to have quite a bit of misdirected anger at me, or people that enjoy watching live sports, when you're really mad at your cable company and their outdated business model.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djp2204 ( 713741 )
          There is enough free news online that you dont need cable news

          • The day Ted Turner created headline news was the day the snowball of political fighting began its journey. Nobody needs 24x7 news. They fill all that time with opinion segments. Nothing but political and financial commentary. Rachael Maddow, Steven Colbert, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson; two sides of the same coin. Keep you watching, keep you triggered, all to sell more ad space. Now that Biden won and Trump is out, I expect Rachaels ratings will slump and Hanitys ratings will rise.

            The online sources are eve

        • Who cares about sports, and you can get news for free and some limited sports with an OTA antenna.

  • This is hilarious. (Score:4, Informative)

    by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @08:45PM (#60941134)
    I have had satellite DirecTV for many years (I know, I know) and just canceled it Monday. Yesterday, another rep called me and offered to cut my rate in half for a year if I stayed. I still declined. She asked why, and I said I have 6 TV's in my house, and you charge $7 per month for each. I can use YouTube TV with Chromecasts on them all and not worry about it. Then she started trying to sell me on AT&T Now....
  • They should launch another round of anti-satellite weaponry, It's only been 20 years.

  • AT&T U-Verse (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:08PM (#60941198)
    Or whatever AT&T is calling their FTTH offering now ("AT&T Broadband?"). This was an extremely horrible experience. There's nothing "technically" wrong with their service. When it works, it's fucking sex. Symmetrical Gigabit to my house in the styx. What's not to like?

    Well, I'll tell you. They don't bury the cable. They run it across the grass, and in "two weeks" "someone" "should" come out and bury it. But nobody ever comes out, and the cable ends up getting cut. So, you get on the phone with a woman in India, and you try to explain what the problem is -- "My fiber was cut, and I need to have someone come out and fix this" -- "Sir, how many lights do you have on your modem?" -- "Lady, ****are you listening to me? My cable is cut****" -- "Sir, how many lights do you have on your modem...."... Ad nauseum. And this shit goes on, over and over again. In the span of a year, the cable being cut and trying to talk to the woman in India, I just couldn't take this utter bullshit anymore.

    I went back to the cable company, and I've been enjoying my mental heath every since.

    • Re:AT&T U-Verse (Score:5, Funny)

      by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @06:02AM (#60942360) Homepage Journal

      There are *FOUR* *LIGHTS*!!!

    • I happened to see some backend info on an AT&T fiber installer's device the other day, and it had a new name across the top.

      AT&T Yahoo!

      No joke.

    • You think that story is bad? I have a vacation cabin with ATT service (phone/internet). Service starts acting up. They recommend a new modem. Great, but you need to send it to my home (billing) address because we are only at the cabin occasionally on weekends. No problem, they say.

      I gave up after the seventh attempt to get a new modem delivered to my home, and switched to a local cable provider. Here are the list of some of the 'results' from each time I called:

      An envelope of instructions (no actua

  • Back when I was trying out the different streaming services, I thought DirectTV Now had a good channel selection at a reasonable price, but I constantly had streaming/buffering issues. Not surprising, since I had experienced the same with the NFL Sunday Ticket streaming service (also by DirectTV) for years. I'm still with Sunday Ticket simply because I can't easily get the content anywhere else, but DTV Now had so many other competitors that ultimately provided a more stable experience.
    • I was one of the early adopters (free Apple TV and still grandfathered in at the early adopter price!). Yes, it stunk for the first year, but now it runs great. Other then the DVR portion (which I don't really use) being a little wonky, I'm now very happy with it. However, it I ever lose the early-bird price, I'm out.

  • It's AT&T so... (Score:5, Funny)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @09:19PM (#60941240) Homepage

    ...it's shit. It was shit, it is shit, and will be shit. That's all you really need to know about AT&T, and the answer to any questions someone may ask you.

    "What do you think about their wireless?" It's shit.
    "Phone service" Shit.
    "broadband" Double shit.

    The only reason they're still in business is because of brand recognition and government contracts ( because government buys shit ).

    • The government also needs to keep the old copper lines in service, but yeah. AT&T is suffocating under its own weight. Too big to function.

      • It's not it's size, but it's incompetence. There are so many silos there, even within the supposedly same departments, and no one knows or cares what happens outside of their own silo.

        The last time I dealt with AT&T it was over a site to site T3. I termed within my cancelation window ( 6 months prior to contract termination ), they kept trying to bill me for years afterwards. One dept said it was termed, the other would say they never received it. I would conference them in, everyone would be in agr

  • Fuck AT&T (Score:2, Informative)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 )
    I fucking hate AT&T.

  • 1: Shove the knife into your guts.
    2: Scramble it around until you fall over dead.

    That's essentially what AT&T did here.

  • 1) Fails to deliver on even the basic expected functionality of other streaming services (pause, rewind).
    2) No way to segregate streaming access from the main account billing access - the max password length for which is below the threshold of what modern computers would consider "trivially guessable."

  • no matter how they package it, if half the channels are spammy homeshopping channels then i dont want it, i refuse to pay some company to put spam on my TV (if i owned a TV) advertising is so annoying that i got rid of my TVs

  • Cable TV execs will never change (Score:3)

    by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @01:17AM (#60941822)

    In 2019, AT&T changed the name from DirecTV Now to AT&T TV Now, creating confusion among customers and its own employees because the company simultaneously unveiled another online streaming service called AT&T TV.

    This reminds me of how some of my favorite TV shows get killed (Futurama is an example) by the sheer stupidity of TV execs:

    - find a good audience and good timeslot for a good show
    - for no apparent (or simply stupid) reason, change the timeslot for said show after the audience has grown, leaving audience confused as to when the show now airs
    - [for extra stupidity points: repeat above step 1-3 times]
    - after some time, kill the popular show, blaming "poor viewership" due to bone-head decision of changing its timeslot
    - Rinse, repeat with various shows

    • Continuing the same lineup of shows gives TV executives no reason to exist. You could drop them from payroll and continue to operate just fine.

      Canceling shows and forcing the creation, evaluation, and approval of new shows requires TV executives to oversee the process, make deals (and receive cushy payola in the form of free dinners, gifts, and sex), and validates that they are in a position of power able to influence the lives of thousands of employees and millions of viewers.

      (Obviously you want some
  • AT&T TV is a pretty solid product at a pretty good price. The only thing it's missing, which is likely temporary(as in give it a year or two as DTV fails), is NFL Network. It's got all the RSNs that competitors like YouTube TV don't have, it's got the major sports networks(ESPN/FS#/MLB/NHL/NBA), just not NFL Network. And I get a nice discount on my mobile service for having TV and mobile through them.

    One thing for sure is that it's better than Frontier and Spectrum's TV offerings, and the Android T
    • Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your weblog when you could be giving us something enlightening to read? bet365-2 [lnwbets.com]

  • trying to look cool by wearing a hoodie and Vans. It just doesn't cut it and doesn't fool anyone. They are just monopolistic dinosaurs. Anything that resembles competition or innovation just baffles them.

  • Keep renaming services! (Score:3)

    by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday January 14, 2021 @10:13AM (#60943148)

    AT&T seem to think that swapping names (and apps) on services will make people leap for joy. When they rebranded HBO's streaming service/app to HBOMax the only thing it did was lose all historical data for the people that had been on the previous service. A nice clean watch list, with no history of what shows you were following or had watched. Which was incredibly helpful. Not.

    I'd imagine the same thing is happening now with this name swap.

    Maybe, just maybe, they should try serving their customers rather than their marketing department's insatiable need to rename and rebrand everything every year or so. I've even heard rumbles HBOMax is due for ANOTHER rebranding in the next year or two because it now contains so much Warner Brothers content that it needs a more apt name. I swear to crap if they dump all historical data on us again I'll drop 'em and never come back.

  • When DirectTV Now launched, I felt like it was a great service - great lineup combined with solid pricing. They were clearly working on improving the product - one of the last things they did before AT&T bought the product was to launch their DVR functionality - limited functionality and storage, but you could see where they could go with that feature.

    Then AT&T bought them, and as far as I can tell, didn't spend any money on further developing the product. Instead, they raised prices several time

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