Losses slow in premium video for AT&T

AT&T has managed to stop some of the rot in its premium video business.

In a regulatory filing, the US operator said that it had lost fewer subscribers in the segment which houses beleaguered satellite TV business DirecTV.

While still recording 473,000 subscriber losses, this is almost half the total of 887,000 who moved away from the service in Q2 2020.

The segment has become one of the worst-performers in AT&T’s business as satellite TV suffers the hardest in the US from cord-cutting.

At a time of massive change for AT&T, the operator sold a 30% stake in DirectTV to TPG Capital earlier this year. This led to the creation of New DirecTV, which includes DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-verse.

That deal however paled in comparison to the announcement that AT&T is to spin off its entertainment and media assets into a standalone business with Discovery. The new business, dubbed Warner Bros. Discovery, will house AT&T’s big-budget streaming service HBO Max and will be led by Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav.