AT&T explains our Digital Lifestyle investing theme
Straight from the horse’s mouth, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson explains the value of the AT&T-Time Warner marriage echoing the reasons why we recently combined our Connected Society, Content is King and Cashless Consumption investing themes to form the Digital Lifestyle one. All we can say is great job Randall, you’re going somewhere kid!
We’ve now assembled the key elements of a modern media company, and it all begins with owning a wide array of premium content because we are absolutely convinced that there is nothing that drives customer engagement like high-quality premium content.
And whether it’s Netflix, Amazon, Google, Disney or Comcast, everybody is now pursuing the same thing. How do you deliver great media and entertainment experiences to our customers? And I think the recent valuations of media companies is reinforcing this point.
But just owning great content is no longer sufficient. The modern media company must develop extensive direct-to-consumer relationships, and we think pure wholesale business models for media companies will be really tough to sustain over time. And when you look across our wireless, pay TV and our broadband businesses, we now have more than 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships.
And these relationships are critical as we begin developing new media experiences for all kinds of different audiences.
So you take these three elements, premium content, 170 million direct-to-consumer relationships and great ad technology and then you combine those with our high-speed networks, and we think all of this is a game changer.
Source: AT&T Inc. (T) CEO Randall Stephenson on Q2 2018 Results – Earnings Call Transcript | Seeking Alpha
