During an interview at World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland with The Wall Street Journal, Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, says the company has been testing both “AT&T” and “DirecTV” for the name of a newly combined pay TV provider.
"We haven't decided yet how we are going to brand it," Stephenson said. "We're testing the DirecTV brand and the AT&T brand, so we're doing a lot of thinking."
For several years now, AT&T has operated its “U-verse” IPTV-delivered TV provider, which now has around 7 million subscribers. But Stephenson reveals that AT&T’s “U-verse” as a business continues to struggle.
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"With 6 or 7 million video subscribers — growing at 24% — we still can't make money because of the programming costs," he said. With the DirecTV acquisition, AT&T total video subscribers would get to 27 million U.S. subscribers.
But with DirecTV, the business takes on a different light. "Put it together with DirecTV, and we have a profitable business to sell into. With DirecTV, we have an ability for someone to walk out of an AT&T store with an iPad and lots of programming. No one else can do that."
Change the U-verse Name to DIRECT TV.
5 TIMES THE ACCOUNTS, 5 TIMES OR MORE THE
CREDIBILITY AND SERVICE REPUTATION.
CHANGE TO U-VERSE BRAND, LOOK FOR A JOB OUT OF MARKETING..............
A marketing team's worst nightmare! DirecTV has a generally positive image out there ... quality, reliability, customer service, etc. AT&T has plenty of negatives (pricing, a [former?] phone company that can't answer customer calls [pushes them to web], billing snafus, dropped calls, dead service areas). Why would they want to cripple their new TV venture with all that baggage?