AT&T Pushes Into More Telco TV Markets, Advertising Will Propel Efforts

Filed in archive IPTV on June 1, 2007

The last time we stopped to smell the AT&T subscribers, we saw that the company had passed up the Tibet's cable company with a blistering 20,000 subscribers in 18 markets. In an investor presentation this week, Randall Stephenson, who will soon become CEO, said AT&T U-verse is now in 30,000 homes and adding about 500 customers a day. Woo woo!

He also said AT&T will increasingly be in both the entertainment and advertising business, looking to offer both across the three screens it serves: broadband-propelled computers, wireless and TV. Ad revenues, he says, "can move the needle for AT&T."

I have no doubt that AT&T will be able to make a solid advertising business, but that will not occur in television anytime soon. When you are adding 500 households a day, it will take quite a while before those numbers will become interesting to marketers. It also does not help that those subscribers are not concentrated in one or two markets, rather they randomly span the country -- much like satellite customers do. (Echostar and directtv are not dynamic ad markets even with millions of subscribers.)