In recent years, DirecTV has been losing tens of millions of dollars a year on its partnership with the NFL, and it can no longer stomach the losses. “But then the NFL began spreading games across various days of the week and giving the rights to other distributors.” “The NFL Sunday Ticket was a great idea when it first started,” Morrow said. The new company will be based in El Segundo and in Denver.īut there will be other changes eventually, including to one of DirecTV’s signature offerings, the NFL Sunday Ticket package.ĭirecTV maintains the rights to out-of-market Sunday afternoon football games through the 2022 season, but when the NFL deal expires the company will probably discontinue the package. DirecTV also said it will honor terms of existing collective bargaining agreements covering union-represented employees. Morrow said he doesn’t envision restructuring the workforce, which already has endured multiple rounds of reorganizations - and multiple management teams - in recent years. Most of the unit’s workers have transitioned to the new DirecTV. of content that consumers want brought to their doorstep,” Morrow said. Rather than offering a jumble of brands, all products will be marketed as DirecTV.Īt its core, DirecTV’s strategy is to return to handling “aggregation, curation and distribution.
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Company research and customer surveys, he said, have shown that many consumers still want bundles of their favorite TV channels in addition to streaming services, like Netflix. Morrow believes the satellite TV business, while declining, will be around longer than some analysts have projected. “For all intents and purposes, AT&T is now out of the pay-TV space.”ĭirecTV will have a five-member board: two representatives of AT&T and two representatives of TPG, as well as Morrow, who plans to bring a different focus to DirecTV. “Although AT&T starts with a 70% stake in DirecTV, they will likely wind down their investment over time,” said Steve Nason, research director for Addison, Texas-based consulting firm Parks Associates. He worked about five years spearheading New Zealand’s efforts to build a nationwide broadband network.ĪT&T hired him in late 2019 when the company was under pressure from an activist investor that demanded that AT&T pay down its debt and get rid of non-core assets. Morrow, a former CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric in San Francisco, has spent more than a decade in the industry. When that deal closed, in July 2015, AT&T became the nation’s largest pay-TV provider with 26 million customers.
The Dallas company paid $49 billion to acquire El Segundo-based DirecTV (and absorbed another $18 billion in debt) with the goal of selling its customers a bundle of TV and phone services. “It’s a new day and a new DirecTV,” Bill Morrow, DirecTV chief executive, said in an interview.ĪT&T’s ownership of DirecTV was disastrous. The AT&T brand will be stripped away as part of DirecTV’s efforts to simplify its message and repair its reputation among consumers. The new DirecTV is made up of AT&T’s three TV distribution businesses: the namesake satellite TV service, the legacy U-verse and the streaming offer AT&T TV. Private equity giant TPG, which contributed $1.8 billion, owns 30% of the new privately held company. On Monday, AT&T completed its spinoff of DirecTV, taking $7.1 billion in cash and 70% interest in the new DirecTV. Six years after AT&T swallowed DirecTV with ambitious plans to modernize the satellite TV business, the telephone company has retreated, returning DirecTV to its roots as a stand-alone company.
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