The historic deal unites AT&T's 132 million wireless customers and 26 million pay-TV subscribers, through its U-Verse and DirecTV brands, with Time Warner's nearly $30 billion in annual revenue from cable networks HBO, CNN, and TNT, and the Warner Bros. movie studio. It's the latest and largest merger between cable and wireless companies and content-makers.
“This is a perfect match of two companies with complementary strengths who can bring a fresh approach to how the media and communications industry works for customers, content creators, distributors and advertisers,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T Chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “We intend to give customers unmatched choice, quality, value and experiences that will define the future of media and communications."


n a world where customers increasingly consume media of all types online, AT&T, Time Warner, and their competitors have had to reevaluate business models that have stayed static for decades. Cable and wireless carriers in the U.S. experienced years of growth by expanding television packages and selling faster Internet connections to a generation of people coming online for the first time. And media companies have made a fortune raising subscriber fees on increasingly unwieldy packages of hundreds of TV channels.
Today, the smartphone and broadband population is largely saturated and television subscribers are trending down. Young people often opt out of expensive TV packages that include more channels than they need. Instead, they are beginning to shift their loyalties to cheaper, more flexible streaming providers like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.
That shift has put both AT&T and Time Warner in a difficult spot. The former doesn't want to become a "dumb pipe" that delivers undifferentiated content over its airwaves. The latter sees danger in the disintegrating cable bundle that has brought it so much success. Together, the two entities can release new services like an over-the-top Internet-based TV offering to compete with the new wave of online competitors.





https://www.cnet.com/news/for-at-t-the-future-is-directv-now/

You get only one chance to make a first impression. 
If that's the case, AT&T may have dropped the ball with many customers who signed up for its DirecTV Now streaming TV service. The telecommunications giant saw its service choke under the demands of its users, marking an embarrassing start for the company.
It was bad enough that T-Mobile CEO John Legere on Wednesday, ahead of AT&T's earnings report, said he would offer any AT&T customer who switched a year of Hulu service to make up for the bumpy start of DirecTV Now. Legere upped his troll game after claiming Tuesday that Verizon is suffering from a midlife crisis. 
In its defense, AT&T can now point to the 200,000 customers it added since the Nov. 30 launch, far higher than Wall Street expected. The numbers, released last week, were likely buoyed by the introductory promotional offer of 100 channels for $35 a month.
On a call with analysts, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson acknowledged that "we're still not completely there on the plumbing" on DirecTV Now, but called it a "very elegant experience."
DirecTV Now represents AT&T's push to transform itself into more than just a phone company, taking control of the content you watch and of how you watch it. AT&T made its push to own the distribution through last year's acquisition of DirecTV, and with its pending deal to buy Time Warner, it wants to be the company behind "Game of Thrones" and Superman. 
Its eagerness to evolve arises in part from the harsh competition in its core wireless business, in which smaller rivals Sprint and T-Mobile are scooping up its subscribers. It's the same trend that has forced Verizon to make its own acquisitive bets, although they're relatively smaller ones, in AOL and Yahoo. 
The fourth quarter saw more of the same for AT&T. While the company added 1.5 million connections, 1.3 million came from lower-revenue connected devices. It also lost 67,000 so-called postpaid customers -- people who pay at the end of the month and tend to be more loyal. Much of its postpaid growth came from connecting tablets.

https://www.wired.com/2016/10/att-buying-time-warner-future-google/

TELECOMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES ARE becoming media companies. That explains AT&T’s agreement to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion. But something else explains it, too.
Media companies are becoming telecoms.
Internet firms like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Netflix are the new media companies. They deliver enormous amounts of video online, posing a direct threat to old-school television and movie companies. But they also are becoming telecoms, threatening the likes of AT&T and Verizon.
They finance undersea cables that link their data centers. They buy fiber optic infrastructure. Facebook builds open source telco gear, Google offers high-speed Internet service, Amazon hopes to become an Internet service provider in Europe.
As this happens, telecoms must fight back. And this means challenging tech giants on the media front.
The proposed AT&T/Time Warner deal combines two powerhouses. AT&T is the nation’s largest pay TV provider, the second-largest wireless provider, and the third-largest home Internet provider.
Time Warner owns a dizzying array of media properties, including HBO, CNN, Warner Brothers, DC Comics, TBS, TNT, the Cartoon Network and broadcast rights to many live sporting events. But it does not own Time Warner Cable, a separate entity that the cable company Charter Communications bought earlier this year.
The deal confirmed today follow’s Comcast’s merger with NBC in 2011 and Verizon’s acquisition of AOL last year and planned acquisition of Yahoo this year.
Pundits quickly noted that diving into the content industry could be AT&T’s attempt to fill the hole that is created as customers ditch cable TV in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. That’s true, but another shift is happening, too.
For years, the big telecom Internet providers essentially operated as dumb pipes. All they did was deliver content. That used to make a lot of sense. A decade ago, the dotcom crash was still a recent memory, and digital piracy threatened to undercut the entire entertainment industry.
How things have changed. AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have watched Amazon, Facebook, and Google take their place among the world’s most valuable—and powerful—companies, using infrastructure owned by the telcos. The entertainment industry rebounded as well, with upstarts like Netflix having reinvented the very idea of television.
What’s more, those same tech companies have increasingly encroached on the telco’s business. They threaten to upend telecommunications much like they’ve upended other industries, aided by the Federal Communications Commission making more of the wireless spectrum available to them.
Google in particular is eager to access more of the spectrum. And it has a few other projects going that could further undermine traditional telcos. Although Google Fiber and the companies wild schemes to use balloons and drones to deliver Internet access to remote areas garner a lot of attention, two other projects promise to be more radical.