While I understand what AT&T is attempting to do here, I don't really support it. IMO, AT&T is attempting to make a name for themselves in the streaming marketing, hoping that they survive long term. Look at how many cable TV and cell phone providers there were 15-20 years ago. Now look at how many there are now. Look at how difficult to damn near impossible it would be now this late in the game to start one up. Look at the DBS industry. Primestar, DirecTV, USSB, Alphastar and Dish. Two survived, three didn't. Then Cablevision finally did something with their licences and launched Voom half way into the third quarter of the ball game and they weren't exactly met with success. I think AT&T realizes that it is still early in this whole streaming game, and they don't want to be the Windows Phone of streaming, when companies like Netflix and Hulu start getting bought out, merged or just naturally fail.
Here's my problem with this. Unlike most vocal people on the subject, I do not believe ISPs should just be dumb pipes. I think the internet infrastructure is too weak, too vulnerable and not mature enough to support the demands people want to place on it. I find it humorous and scary how many people put their faith into the internet and then when something happens and they are without it, they are lost. I also find it scary how many people put their connection in the hands of 'the wifi' and think good, reliable ethernet is old fashion. Earth to idiots, somewhere down the line, something is hardwired. I've been looking into getting a CB radio for my car, and was asking the opinion of someone at work about one, and them I mentioned that one day I'd like to get into Ham radio. The dumb millennial in the cubical across from us, who didn't really know what either of those were until we explained it, said 'why use that when there's Facebook now'. I just walked away in awe and sadness. Or people that I know who upload their entire lives to various remote hosting services and don't have local copies and then are board to tears and can't function when the power or worse yet the wifi goes out and they can't access their crap, and they don't want to use their oh so precious cellular data.
I also don't see how AT&T could pull this off in a commercial environment. Sports bars that have NFL Sunday Ticket or the other packages would need at least a few hundred megabit dedicated connection.