Weekly rewind
AT&T teases a cheap streaming bundle–in court: During sworn testimony in a federal antitrust case on Thursday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said his company will soon launch a $15 per month sports-free streaming bundle called DirecTV Watch. The service will be free to AT&T wireless subscribers, echoing the $15 per month discount that unlimted data subscribers already get on DirecTV Now streaming bundles. A pretrial brief said the service will include channels from Turner and “a small number of popular cable networks.”
By revealing the plans in court, Stephenson was trying to paint AT&T as innovative and consumer-friendly, even as it tries to gobble up Time Warner for $85 billion. The U.S. Department of Justice wants to block the acquisition on antitrust grounds.
AT&T has pulled this trick before. Immediately after announcing its acquisition plans in October 2016, the company said DirecTV Now would cost just $35 per month for more than 100 channels. It turns out that was a limited-time offer. While DirecTV Now still starts at $35 per month, the price for 100-plus channels rose to $60 per month for new subscribers shortly after launch. Before getting too excited for DirecTV Watch, let’s wait for the fine print.
How ESPN+ could be better: A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my dissatisfaction with ESPN+, the new $5 per month streaming service that has no overlap with ESPN’s cable channels. Over at Fast Company, I brainstormed several ways ESPN could improve the service and its accompanying app–even without blowing up the company’s still-lucrative cable business model.
ESPN’s new app could still appeal to cord-cutters with live sports news and highlights, like the kind that CBS now offers for free. ESPN could also make highlights easier to access overall, help steer users toward streaming bundles that include ESPN’s cable channel, and look to repackage live sports into more innovative bundles. The overarching problem is that ESPN is more concerned with defending its cable business than with proactively trying to bring in new audiences.
Fire TV televisions are back: Best Buy and Amazon have formed an unusual alliance to sell smart TVs with Amazon’s Fire TV software built in. Under the multiyear deal, Best Buy will carry Fire TV Edition televisions in its retail stores, on its website, and on Amazon.com as a third-party merchant. The first of these TVs will come from Toshiba this summer, followed by several from Best Buy’s in-house Insignia brand later this year, though the companies haven’t announced prices or other details yet.
Amazon first put its streaming software into TVs from Westinghouse, Element, and Seiki last year. The software is similar to that of Amazon’s Fire TV boxes and sticks, but they also have some nifty over-the-air integration, letting you time-shift live TV and tune to specific channels using Alexa voice commands. The arrival of new Fire TV Edition sets could turn up the pressure on Roku, which has been putting its operating system into smart TVs since 2014. (One of those TV partners was Insignia, which will actually stop making Roku TVs as part of Best Buy’s deal with Amazon; Best Buy will continue selling Roku TVs from other vendors such as Sharp and TCL.)
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