AT&T’s (T) bid to compete in the TV space and push the cable barbarians back into the Stone Age is off to a rocky start. The company announced a couple of small items. First, their expenditure to get the service up and running will be $1.4 billion more than planned. Let’s hope that no one in the accounting department lost his job.
According to The Wall Street Journal, there is at least one other problem: "The company also downgraded by one million the number of homes to which it will offer U-verse to 18 million…"
The new service, called U-verse, is AT&T’s attempt to get into the TV business so it can offer voice, television and broadband in one package. The cable companies are doing that already, and they are taking a ton of voice customers from the phone companies every quarter. In Q1, Comcast (CMCSA) added over 500,000 VoIP subscribers. Time Warner Cable (TWC), Cablevision (CVC), and Charter (CHTR) has equailly impressive voice subscriber additions for the quarter.
They had to come from somewhere.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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