AT&T Entertainment CEO Discusses Future Strategies
John Stankey finds himself a lot at the center of television entertainment these days. He was the chief strategy officer of AT&T’s 4.5 billion dollars acquisition of DirecTV.
After the acquisition, AT&T made Stankey the CEO for their entertainment group, which reaches more than twenty five million TV viewers, fifty seven million of broadband locations, and one third of the wireless market in the US. These three sides converges to make “American Telephone and Telegraph” that is much bigger than just a telephone and telegraph company, and they are expecting more in the future.
AT&T plans to become the chief information officer for all their subscribers. “I don’t feel by any stretch of the imagination that things are any easier,” Stankey said in a press release. It is true that none of the other service providers has the assets that AT&T has, but Charter, Comcast, Hulu, and Netflix, all are capable of biting into the segments of AT&T strategy.
Position Of AT&T In The Life Of A Customer
“When a customer makes a decision to go all-in with us and get the broadband connection from us and their entertainment connection, their family’s using our wireless service, they’ll come back and say, ‘You know, I pay you more than my auto payment. You’re that important to what I do,’” Stankey said.
“Our goal is to ultimately try to get the whole bundle from them and deepen that relationship and earn that business all the way through,” he said. Reaching such a payment level puts big expectations on the services offered by AT&T. It is clear that AT&T plans to become the CIO of their subscribers.
When asked on the acquisition of DirecTV, Stankey said that you just cannot make a deal and wait for miracles to happen. “Getting the deal done is relatively easy, it’s doing integration successfully after that’s the harder part,” he said. “Getting a deal done requires tens of people in a room, and agreeing to contracts and languages. Getting the value to a shareholder requires the cooperation of tens of thousands of people.”