AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has confirmed that the long-anticipated availability of DirecTV as an “over-the-top” option for consumers will take place before the end of 2016.
Speaking last week at the Goldman Sachs 25th Annual Communacopia Conference in New York, Stephenson told attendees that the “full service” OTT platform will take on the “DirecTV Now” branding, and consumers would see tiered monthly subscriptions between $40 and $55.
Stephenson called the price points “very, very aggressive.”
To access DirecTV as an OTT option, consumers will download an app on their smartphone, their smart TV or their tablet. As Stephenson described, “they subscribe purely digitally, they select their content digitally, they interact with us digitally … the billing is purely an online billing arrangement. This is a very, very low cost customer acquisition product. It is a very low cost to install product meaning the customer has just done it once they downloaded the app. There are no set-top boxes, they are no truck rolls involved in this.”
DirecTV Now was announced in Q1 2016, with the 20 million households in the U.S. that don’t have cable as the key consumer target.
