Advanced Television

AT&T confirms DirecTV OTT

September 26, 2016

By Chris Forrester

AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson has confirmed that the giant telco – which owns DirecTV – will offer an OTT service this year. He told analysts that the ‘full service’ OTT offering will be branded DirecTV and would cost between $40-$55 a month depending on the tier taken by users.

Stephenson said: “[users would] download an app on their smartphone, their smart TV or their tablet, they subscribe purely digitally, they select their content digitally, they interact with us digitally, the billing is purely an online billing arrangement. This is a very, very low cost customer acquisition product. It is a very low cost to install product meaning the customer has just done it once they downloaded the app. There are no set-top boxes, they are no truck rolls involved in this.”

He added that the OTT service would generate “thinner, not thin” profit margins, “But I’m always willing to take thinner margins, when there is low capital intensity in the product.”

Categories: Articles, OTT