the NEW YORK – the television of The future can be born from the merger of these two giants: AT&T and Time Warner. Always not win the election, Donald Trump: he said that would ban. While if he wins, Hillary Clinton is to provide for an investigation of antitrust that can be completed with the request for the sale of a few pieces of the new entity.
AT&T, in the part of the buyer willing to spend over 85 billion dollars, is a telecom traditional, and as such manages an infrastructure-based cables, repeaters for mobile phones or wifi, fiber optics, and broadband. AT&T, which was born from the stew of the monopolist But Bell, dates back to the origins of the telephone in the United States. Most recently, he had already made incursions into the craft of television, but especially by the side of the infrastructure through DirectTV offers satellite link-up.
Time Warner is a conglomerate of media. The two brands that give the name to the company, are easily identifiable: the weekly magazine Time, and the film production company Warner Brothers. But in reality these are not the important pieces, nor the most profitable of the group. In there there is the Cnn, and especially Hbo, which is a gold mine with its tv programs for a fee. What, then, is the idea of the tv of the future that can arise from the union? Is a tv dematerialized, a content flow that is independent from the old household, and we called it television. It is the realisation that among the younger generations, and not only them, the enjoyment of movies, television shows, entertainment and information, it is already today less through a television screen. There are those who prefer the computer, those who have the tablet, who the smartphone. This also means that the mobile consumption, which can not be bound by a cable at home, nor from any other tin electronics located in your home or office. Tv ubiquitous and portable, the traveling. Times and moments of listening I decided by the viewer, not from the schedule. Finally, a tariff regime as a result of: just subscriptions, monthly, or yearly, pay to the consumer, if I want to. This is already a reality, and is accompanied by the emergence of new players in this field: Netflix and Amazon from the production side of content, Apple and Google for the technical supports that replace the old tv. In this perspective, the acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T is only a part of an operation that is futuristic; from another point of view, this is a defensive move in a landscape that has already changed profoundly.
The idea you can also describe in another way, that we are more familiar with. Is the marriage between the medium and the message, he would have said semiotician canadian, Marshall McLuhan. It is the aggregation of an infrastructure of the AT&T, made up of cables, repeaters, broadband, satellites, with a company like Time Warner that makes the production of content, from movies to television series to journalism. The junction point is DirectTV which has already begun to diversify from its original vocation, i.e. the pay-tv via satellite and is available on multiple media: even the mini-screen installed on the taxis in new york that entertains us passengers during long traffic jams of Manhattan; or the mini-screen installed in the seats of many airlines in the Usa. The first market on which they want to bet AT&T, are those 20 million americans who reject the slavery of the pay tv home, don’t have subscriptions of any kind, nor “boxes” housewives of repeate rs in the digital. AT&T bet on a future in which the mode of access prevalent to television programs will be the Internet, and then access wifi is available everywhere you are. And without having to sign a contract for the supply, as, moreover, already have offers streaming of Netflix and Amazon. The future of pay tv becomes very similar to any app on your smartphone: use it when I need to, as I do with the app of Uber when I need to take a ride in the car. Indeed, already in his craft the original AT&T has a precise perception of the evolution of our habits. As a telecom operator, AT&T knows that 60% of its traffic on mobile need to download video images from the Internet.
be Careful, though: sometimes marriages fail. The fact that they appear to be solid, and projected towards a future bright, it is not a guarantee of success. Your Time Warner is an example. In an era that seems remote, but that goes back to fifteen years ago, during the first revolution of the Internet, it was Aol (America Online) to acquire Time Warner. Even in that case, it was a mixture between medium and message: a part of Aol as the Internet service provider, on the other, the content of entertainment and information. It was an abject failure because Aol started quickly at sunset. Recently Aol, that the buyer of Time Warner, had become a branch, a minor, was spun off and sold to another giant of the telecom, Verizon. The flop of the marriage between Aol and Time Warner remains as a warning: it is not said that merge the infrastructures of communication and content is a winning idea.
The vertices AT&T today are convinced that a mistake to avoid is exclusivity. That is, the idea of reserving the content (Hbo and Cnn, for example) only the telephone subscribers of AT&T. This distinguishes the strategy of AT&T from new rivals in the industry such as Amazon, Hulu and Netflix, that instead some form of exclusive prefer to do it in. For now, AT&T prefer to focus on a different goal, to make more fluid our everyday experience of the audience. An expression they use – not just poetic – describes the new AT&T as an “aggregator of aggregators”, a hub is open, from which you access to everything, possibly in the easiest way and with an experience sliding, of high technical quality. A prediction: the other competitors will not stand still.
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