AT&T Wants To Move To A Software Centric System?

[CSM]

AT&T's Ceo's spoke to Goldman Sachs this morning and here is the transcript. In it he mentions about replacing the dish and boxes and going to a software based system.

AT&T's (T) CEO Randall Stephenson Presents at Goldman Sachs Communacopia Brokers Conference (Transcript) | Seeking Alpha

"We will be ambivalent as to whose broadband, the television service reverses [ph], and so, a software-based platform, we are delivering that will not require a satellite dish on the roof, and a very thin client in the home, rather than a big set-top-box, a big birth of set-top-box, a very thin client, and all the DVR and all the replay capabilities will be largely cloud-based. And so, we are developing this very, very quickly, taking DIRECTV Now and leveraging it into a scalable platform that goes into the home as the primary service. We are launching a beta of this in the fourth quarter of this year. And you will see us begin to roll the service out as we get into 2018. And we are actually really excited about this, because you suddenly take the customer acquisition costs of somebody having traditional video service in their home, you take that installation cost down dramatically, and again, you can begin to work the yields for the customer without destroying margins."

 

[navychop]

I hope they do. It will send a lot of folks to Dish. Maybe he'll sell Dish what they still have of the 119 slot.

And even those with broadband, REAL broadband, may not be thrilled with the speed of trick plays on a DVR function in the cloud. On Dish Anywhere, it's no where near as fast as on my Hopper 2 DVR.

 

[CSM]

I hope they do. It will send a lot of folks to Dish. Maybe he'll sell Dish what they still have of the 119 slot.

And even those with broadband, REAL broadband, may not be thrilled with the speed of trick plays on a DVR function in the cloud. On Dish Anywhere, it's no where near as fast as on my Hopper 2 DVR.

You don't like 5g, an APP and the cloud DVR would be cool?

 

[larry55]

Good bye D when you do. Don't have the internet speed here . Have centurylnk dsl and speed 10 MB. Be changing over to dish.

 

[CSM]

Good bye D when you do. Don't have the internet speed here . Have centurylnk dsl and speed 10 MB. Be changing over to dish.

What about 5g doing 100 mbps to 1,000 Gbps?

 

[navychop]

Let's see how far 5G makes it in the next five years. Much of the country- nine tenths of never.

I have Roku today. Nice. But doesn't function as well as my Dish DVR. And dare I say, not as well as DTV DVRs? How much better will the higher speed make the user experience? Much of the work is not on the speed of transfer.

 

[Radioguy41]

He's nuts. Far too much of the country does not have the necessary broadband. Blue is broadband. People who live in populous areas make the unfounded assumption that everybody has broadband or access to broadband and that's just not true.

 

[keenan]

AT&T says all sorts of things, especially to investors, so while I'm sure they'll probably have their trial at the end of the year I wouldn't expect to see any sort of appreciable adoption rate of the service for years, if ever. In fact, AT&T will have likely have moved on to some other different system of video delivery. Remember, this is a company that says it's going to do a lot of things but very often doesn't do them.

 

[navychop]

Could be a red herring.

 

[CSM]

Could he have been referencing AT&T's Project Air Gig?

 

[EarDemon]

What about 5g doing 100 mbps to 1,000 Gbps?

I'll believe that when I see it. Uncapped, unthrottled sustained speeds of that that magnitude will be extremely difficult to impossible to maintain with a large number of users. A few years ago when we switched to Time Warner for our PRI at work, I was geeking out with the guy that upgraded our media converter who was a business class fiber engineer that was out in the field doing odd jobs that day. We got to talking about cellular backhaul and he told me all four of the cell phone providers in our region use them as their backhaul provider. Just about all Sprint towers use them, and the vast majority of AT&T towers are powered by TWC. He said, it's pretty much standard that all towers are fed by a 1 Gbps connection. Currently they top out at 10 Gbps. The math just doesn't add up for high population areas. For the lower population areas, the tower density just isn't there. We all know speeds dissipates over distance. Cell providers have been gobbling up low spectrum, but really how much can that help for people who are outside of the range.

And no, I don't want a 'cloud' (stupidest buzzword ever) DVR, or use a cumbersome app, when generally the GUIs of all the major MSOs get it done with less hassle.

 

[rad]

Wasn't it recently posted that DIRRCTV had contracted for a couple more satellites?

 

[navychop]

AirGig may well turn out to be the red headed stepchild of BPL!

 

[ncted]

Blah, blah, blah. This is the same crap that Sun Microsystems espoused back in the day with "the network is the computer" marketing and their Java-based thin clients. In a way they were right, but not in the ways they meant. I am sure some of the stuff he is proposing will happen, but most of it won't happen when or how he says it will, and he most likely knows that. He is just doing his job of making AT&T seem innovative to investors.

 

[vazhog]

I think the Key word - is Getting Video service to customers without costly installations! = Loss of Trucks & drivers and Installers all greatly reduce Lots of overhead! or doing more with less

 

[goaliebob99]

Wasn't it recently posted that DIRRCTV had contracted for a couple more satellites?

Yes, DirecTV is going to remain a premium product as well as it will maintain it's satellite fleet to handle areas that wont have access to air gig, or broadband for that matter. Remember power lines are buried in many places.

 

[Soccernut]

Will AirGig work on areas that have underground utility wires?

 

[navychop]

I suppose they could mount the equipment on above ground transformers. In dense areas, this would work. Probably not much below ground in "sparse" areas. But this will drive up costs. Which are likely already underestimated.

 

[larry55]

I don't see that happen no time soon.

 

[Claude Greiner]

AT&T can't even offer decent speeds to all of the areas that are served by uverse.