AT&T CEO: Deal With DirecTV Is Expected To Close In Q2, AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson spoke with FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Maria Bartiromo about the AT&T and DIRECTV (NASDAQ:DTV) deal. Stephenson said DirecTV has “incredible content relationships with the large folks” and that “will make our TV business profitable almost day one upon closing DirecTV.”
When asked when they expect to close the deal with DirecTV, Stephenson said, “second quarter of next year.” Stephenson also commented on net neutrality “we are two, three years down the road before you get any clarity to this.” When asked about the risk of having heavy dependence on one carrier, Stephenson said, “no, I don’t worry about it at all” and “the iPhone customer base is a unique customer base. It’s a very, very, in fact, I would tell you, the customers we have on the iPhone is probably the premier customer base in the world for a smart phone.”
DirecTV, I think, is the premier pay TV business in the world. And when we complete that transaction, we will be the largest pay TV provider in the world. And it’s a terrific platform.
It’s a really a good platform. They have great programming arrangements. And so what was most attractive to us is, I motioned earlier that we’ve built a very nice TV business. We have six million subscribers. Unfortunately, six million subscribers you can’t be profitable. Your programming costs are so high without scale that you lose money. But you have to be in the video business to be in the broadband business, right? So we buy DirecTV and they have these incredible content relationships with the large folks like Fox and – like NBC and so forth. And that will make our TV business profitable almost day one upon closing DirecTV.
So it really helps improve the financials of our — of our current TV business. And it’s — it’s a big number. It’s we’ve announced that the synergies from this deal will be $1.6 billion per year in lowered costs. And so that obviously is very attractive to us. But the second is DIRECTV can provide TV service to anywhere in the United States. We have a mobile business that provides service to anywhere in the United States.”
Sticky customers. And so to the extent that we can have a TV and a mobile service that use the same distribution and do joint billing and joint distribution of video across the TV, across the laptop, across the tablet and across the mobile device, we think that’s where the industry is going. And so this gives us the ability to compete across all of the streams, have terrific content relationships where we can deliver this content across all screens. And so I get really excited when I talk about this.”
“This internet is the engine for our economy now. It’s a major driver of economic growth. And to take end-to-end this internet capability and put it under regulations that truly were designed to regulate an AT&T monopoly in 1930, black rotary dial tone phones. Think about this. There weren’t even data services. We weren’t even carrying data across pipes. We were, but it was called the telegraph, right? And so to take this Internet, this massive ecosystem that is moving fast, the products are moving fast, the features are moving fast, and put them under that kind of regulatory framework, you can formulate your own opinion as to whether that’s a good idea or not.
Even if you believe it’s a good idea to accomplish what the president has proposed is going to be a very elongated process, because the law has been pretty clear for 20 years, starting with the FCC chairman under President Clinton, Bill Canard, and coming forward. For 20 years, the FCC has stated very clearly that these services do not belong under those rules. And then the Supreme Court has upheld those decisions time and again. And so for the president to accomplish what he wants is going to be a very long process by the FCC to get it done. And then the people can rest assured that somebody, whether it’s AT&T or not, somebody will litigate that outcome. So we are two, three years down the road before you get any clarity to this. Now, the implication of that is without clarity, we’re in long-term investment cycles in this industry. We invest billions of dollars in broadband and I don’t think anything is going to change the next two or three years under this premise.”
