AT&T Starts a Streaming Service in a Wildly Competitive Market

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 4:35PM EST · Published Oct 11, 6:55AM EDT

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AT&T Starts a Streaming Service in a Wildly Competitive Market — © Thinkstock

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) will launch its own video streaming business, with program assets it has acquired from its buyout of Time Warner. It has put itself onto on a tough road currently dominated by Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, which makes its prospects limited.

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The company announced in an SEC filing:

On October 10, 2018, we announced plans to launch a new direct-to-consumer (D2C) streaming service in the fourth quarter of 2019. This is another benefit of the AT&T/Time Warner merger, and we are committed to launching a compelling and competitive product that will serve as a complement to our existing businesses and help us to expand our reach by offering a new choice for entertainment with the WarnerMedia collection of films, television series, libraries, documentaries and animation loved by consumers around the world. We expect to create such a compelling product that it will help distributors increase consumer penetration of their current packages and help us successfully reach more customers.

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Netflix and Amazon each have over 100 million video-streaming customers. They invest billions of dollars in their own programming. On a lesser basis, so does Hulu. And Disney plans to start a similar service. AT&T is very late to this market, and one has to wonder how it will edge out these much larger companies. Streaming may not be a zero-sum game if people are willing to take one more service, but there is no reason to believe that is likely.

AT&T is launching a streaming business because it has the assets to do so. That does not make it a good idea.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.