AT&T Loses Nearly 1 Million TV Customers After Raising DirecTV Prices (arstechnica.com) 75
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T lost 946,000 TV subscribers in Q2 2019, a loss that the company attributed to price increases, competition, and other factors. AT&T reported a net loss of 778,000 subscribers in the "Premium TV" category, which includes its DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services. AT&T attributed this loss to "an increase in customers rolling off promotional discounts, competition, and lower gross adds due to a focus on the long-term value customer base." AT&T also lost 168,000 subscribers of DirecTV Now, an online service with linear channels that's similar to traditional satellite and cable TV. AT&T said the DirecTV Now customer loss was "due to higher prices and less promotional activity," meaning that customers have balked at price increases and a refusal to extend discounts.
The Premium TV loss brought AT&T down to 21.6 million customers in that category, while the DirecTV Now loss brought that service down to 1.3 million customers. Including both, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2108 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. The loss of 946,000 TV subscribers easily outstripped last quarter's AT&T net loss of 627,000 subscribers. "AT&T said it expects a similar level of video losses to continue in the current quarter," according to Reuters.
The Premium TV loss brought AT&T down to 21.6 million customers in that category, while the DirecTV Now loss brought that service down to 1.3 million customers. Including both, AT&T's total number of video subscribers dropped from 25.4 million in Q2 2108 to 22.9 million in Q2 2019. The loss of 946,000 TV subscribers easily outstripped last quarter's AT&T net loss of 627,000 subscribers. "AT&T said it expects a similar level of video losses to continue in the current quarter," according to Reuters.
Shedding customers.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shedding customers.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Shedding customers.... (Score:2)
Yes they went out for a walk, joined a local sports team, back to school, the gym. TV consumption is way down even after including Netflix etc. Cord cutting is a significant phenomenon. Losing 5% of your subscriber base and expecting to do it again next quarter are not statistical abberations
Exercise instead of TV? Yeah right... (Score:3)
Yes they went out for a walk, joined a local sports team, back to school, the gym.
Hahahahah.... This is America. Our average waistlines disprove your hypothesis about being suddenly active.
TV consumption is way down even after including Netflix etc.
Traditional TV yes but online streaming (YouTube etc) is up and so is internet usage. There hasn't been a massive increase in suddenly active Americans. They just have other sedentary options that weren't available before. Traditional TV offers a pretty terrible value proposition and it's only recently that people had better alternatives. Such things have inertia and take time to change but cable
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found the sucker still paying monthly for his rotary phone.
Maybe even still renting their phone too. /s
Some people have dedicated phone lines for "special purpose equipment" like life support and similar critical needs.
You can get unlimited cellular calling and texting for as low as $14 a month for everything else.
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You can get unlimited cellular calling and texting for as low as $14 a month for everything else.
I've been paying $7/month for years and years and years.
It was in fact when SBC purchased AT&T and renamed itself AT&T that I finally dropped the land line. SBC had previously bought out the local bell only a few years prior. Rates were going up for no good reason, which made me finally look into the cost of cheap cell phones.
I was not a hand-held computing technophobe by any stretch. Had a Palm Pilot for years. What the emerging smart phone market did was drive the cost of non-smart phone plan
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Good (Score:5, Funny)
And here I thought Slashdot wasn't a feelgood site
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It is traditional here to throw a little bit of fanservice in between the clickbait and the flamebait.
They shouldn't have declared it was over. (Score:5, Interesting)
Didn't they basically announce the end of DirecTV by saying they would launch no more satellites? That pretty much puts a limit on how long they can even provide DirecTV service, when the last satellite dies it's all over.
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This. Their cost of service is going to keep rising as they let their infrastructure age out and go away, so they'll keep raising the price for anyone who's willing to pay through the nose to shut the party down.
They're just cleaning up that last bit of the tail.
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AT&T doesn't respect their customers (Score:5, Insightful)
the guy running the show at at@t it just straight up greedy and he does not even try and deny it.
That's been the case for ages. I met Ed Whitacre [wikipedia.org] back when he was CEO of AT&T (circa 2003) and he pretty plainly had nothing but contempt for his customers. He was outspoken against net neutrality. (In 2006, Whitacre he said companies like Google, Yahoo! or Vonage should not be able to “use the pipes for free.”) I think a lot of this is cultural holdover from the fact that the phone companies have always been de-facto monopolies and thus never really had to give a shit if their customers didn't like this or that policy. As long as they kept the regulators happy they could do whatever they wanted.
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Not that it makes much difference, but that is a different AT&T, SWB purchased AT&T in 2005 and changed its name to AT&T. I'm sure SWB's CEO had equal contempt.
Same CEO. Ed Whitacre was the CEO of SBC when they purchased AT&T. And no it wasn't a different AT&T. It was getting the band back together - or at least a portion of it. AT&T had the bigger and better brand so they used that even though technically SBC was the bigger company at the time and was actually doing the buying. That happens fairly often actually plus there are some arcane financial reasons companies sometimes have the smaller company "buy" the bigger one even though we know what
They just launched a satellite on June 20th (Score:3, Insightful)
The CEO of AT&T didn't even know they were in the process of getting another satellite ready to launch when he made that statement. That should tell you everything you need to know about how qualified he is as a CEO.
Directv's current satellite fleet will last over a decade, they can keep providing satellite TV for a long time. It may diminish but people in rural areas and businesses won't be customers for streaming for a long long time.
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Directv's current satellite fleet will last over a decade, they can keep providing satellite TV for a long time. It may diminish but people in rural areas and businesses won't be customers for streaming for a long long time.
Or 2020 (Musk Time)(2021 more likely), when Starlink comes online.
If you thought DirecTV's losses were big before, just wait until rural customers can not only get streaming Internet video but also all the rest of the Internet at high speeds, for no more than they're paying for DirecTV. If AT&T has more than 1 million left in 5 years I'll be astonished.
I do wonder exactly how fast uptake for Starlink will be. People are notoriously slow to change utilities, even when their current utility is treating
TV with ads is worth precisely zero (Score:5, Interesting)
At some point, services will need to deliver a product people value. Prices are going up, and services become less and less usable. The market is fragmenting, ads are going up, and viewers are learning how their viewing habits are being sold to marketers.
I wouldn't pay a dime for that experience. Many others feel the same.
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The wireless market is always in a slow but real flux. They have to bid on spectrum to improve their service, and its not always the same winners and losers.
The wired market on the other hand is very stable because people dont know who the real villain is (its your local government) and pretend that its a federal issue. They can upgrade as n
Comment removed (Score:3)
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AT&T brought DirectTV to kill it off. (Score:4, Interesting)
They only wanted it for the IP and distribution rights. Once the satellites start to fail that will be the end of the service.
https://spacenews.com/directv-... [spacenews.com]
They also sold off lots of their U-Verse wireline to Frontier.
AT&T only wants to be in to cellular and any streaming will be based around cellular distribution. DirectTV DBS is dead man walking.
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So what is Direct TV? (Score:3)
The wikipedia page is unclear.
For the $50-$70/month do you get ad-free content?
Like Netflix, but scheduled, not on-demand? Good for rural people without broadband internet?
Australia has an expensive satellite service Foxtel (yes, *that* Fox), and the only reason I can see to subscribe to that is if you are a sports fan, as they have monopoly deals on live sport.
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You know that Goat.se guy?
It's like that. But wider.
Re:So what is Direct TV? EXPLAINED! (Score:2)
This is a very clear explanation. Congrats to Mr or Ms Coward. Is it correct? I don't know because I don't use Direc TV, but it probably is. Somebody who can should probably mod them up. I'm posting this using my Karma Bonus just to call attention to him (or her, ...or it? In case it's an AI.)
I quit, but not because of TV (Score:3)
Intermittent internet connection disconnects, packet loss, poor DNS performance, etc. Gotta be some kind of hardware/wire problem along the line. The unfriendliest built-in Wi-Fi router. The tech's never figured it out. Every time I tell them about packet loss, they immediately offered to fix the problem by upgrading 45Mbps pipe to 100Mbps or so. It was useless, so I quit, and disconnected cable TV as well.
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offered to fix the problem by upgrading 45Mbps pipe to 100Mbps or so
You didnt want to more than double your packet losses? Whats wrong with you!
I left over Tivo . . . (Score:2)
The retention guy was flabbergasted when he asked why I was leaving, and I replied, "Your DVRs suck."
I had not been a DirecTV user who used a tivo;I had direct as the way of feeding my tivo . . . when they replaced my failed tiros with their own, it was just too piano.
I got cable and a Romio (?), but tit turns out that the tivo interface is now a weak version of its former self, with extra pushes needed to do what was once simple, apparently so they can try to sell you streams or purchases in the process .
We need more channel choice not tiers (Score:3)
We need more channel choice not tiers.
In the UK, NZ, AUS. (canadian tv with pick and play plans) sports is not forced on to you.
In usa you pay like /mo golf channel (in higher basic tears) /mo (in market rate each) ACC Network, Longhorn Network, SEC Network, BIG 10, PAC 12 (in most basic plans for the in market one)(some are in basic for all on some systems) /mo FS1 and FS2 (in most basic plans) /mo NBC SPORTS NETWORK (in most basic plans) /mo for all MLB NETWORK, NBA-TV, NHL Network, Tennis Channel, NFL network (in higher basic tears) /mo each local in market RSN (some areas have 2-5 that are market) (in most basic plans)
$10-12/mo for ESPN, ESPN 2, ESPN News, ESPNU. (in most basic plans)
$0.50?
$0.50-$1
$1.50-$2
$0.50?
$2-3
$3-$6
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If I'm paying for the content, then stop shoving advertising down my throat.
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Then I presume you'd be happy to pay HBO-like prices for every single channel. This is what would probably have to happen if all channels that currently use a mix of subscriber revenue and advertisement revenue were to switch to only subscriber revenue.
Re:We need more channel choice not tiers (Score:4, Insightful)
Canada is really bad too, quite frankly. The "basic cable" package is $25/mo for 25 channels. You can add channels after that if you want. But still, you start at $25/mo. Oh, did I say $25/mo? I forgot equipment rentals, which you can purchase if you want. And taxes. And levies. And fees.... no thanks. Not worth it at all.
Last year, the CRTC forced the cable companies to create a "basic lite" option. The cable companies gamed the system so bad there is no demand for it. It was a complete joke. The CRTC looked like absolute idiots over it.
I'm proud to say I have not had cable since 2010, and that was a 3 month experiment after not having had cable for 6 years prior. Nobody used it during that 3 months. I think I watched it once and turned it off because it was so bad.
And the suits still don't get it (Score:3)
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I'd rather just watch cute Koreans eating on youtube, or people gardening, than most of what is available as "television" or whatever they call these "shows" now that they're streamed.
Long Term Value Customer (price elasticity?) (Score:5, Interesting)
As I recall from Econ 101 (something I took before a man walked on the Moon), there's this notion of price elasticity. If you charge more, you sell less, but you make more per unit sold so you may or may not make more profit depending on where you are on some price demand curve. I think what AT&T are saying with that 'long term value customer' expression, is that they hope that the customers who stay, and fork over more money to stay, will keep their profits up. I admit it sounds fishy, but maybe that's their spin on it.
Re:Long Term Value Customer (price elasticity?) (Score:4, Interesting)
Well done, yes, that is exactly what they were explicitly saying using terms of art from their industry. They lowered prices towards the bottom of the curve ("promotions") to get a big crop of new customers and then they raised them to a higher part of the curve to get rid of the cheapskates and retain the more valuable customers who are willing to pay more. They also anticipate continuing that move up the price curve.
An easy fix, but they won't do it (Score:3)
If you want folks to come back to DirecTv all of the following conditions need to be met:
1) Drop the price. At least in half. ( or see # 3 ) It is definitely not worth the price they demand today.
2) Group the commercials. Show them all either prior to the show ( like the theaters do ) or at the end. No interruptions every eight minutes.
3) Pick your own channels at X cost per channel vs a costly bundle of sh*t no one wants to see.
Yes, this means most of the channels will go away once they're no longer subsidized by bundle packaging.
Few will miss the Jesus Channels, Shopping Channels, Infomercials and programming in a language we don't even speak.
The choice is easy: You either make it financially attractive and worth my time to watch, or you watch it slowly die as folks find better alternatives.
Re:An easy fix, but they won't do it (Score:4, Insightful)
If you want folks to come back to DirecTv
It says right in the summary that they don't want that.
"a focus on the long-term value customer base."
It might help if you understant that the word "value" attaches to "long-term" and not "customer." It isn't a value customer. It is a customer who has long-term value to the company. That is business speak for people willing to pay more. They don't want people unwilling to pay more to come back.
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Nooooo...I'd miss the Jesus channels, especially "Camp Meeting". They have a rotating cast of Preachers, some claim to be Doctors of Something or Other. They all have a common theme, that thou shalt give unto them a "seed" which usually is about $1000. They have appeals where they ask G-d to send them 1000 people who will give their "seeds". The idea is that G-d will reward you if you do this. They are very good about claiming G-d does not yield favors for money, which is convenient seeing as G-d isn't coll
That business is dead the TV (Score:2)
Just my 2 cents
starlink & related services will kill... (Score:2)
Grumpy cat sez: (Score:1)
Lantern in daylight, eh? (Score:2)
Why no mention of "freedom" or "choice". Of course the relevant questions are "What options exist where ATT is losing customers?" and "Where ATT is NOT losing customers what options should be made available?"
Of course ATT's idea of a "solution" is to buy up any competitors or boost the cost for access to competing content or both.
Suggested solution approaches available upon polite request. Whoops. Forgot this is Slashdot. Phuck solutions or politeness. ROFLMAO at the very idea.
When I daydream about winning the lottery, (Score:2)