AT&T Breaks Another Merger Promise In Making 'Friends' Exclusive

from the who-could-have-predicted-it dept

Last year AT&T defeated the DOJ's challenge to the company's $86 billion merger with Time Warner thanks to a comically narrow reading of the markets by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon. At no point in his original 172-page ruling (which approved the deal without a single condition) did Leon show the faintest understanding that AT&T intends to use vertical integration synergistically with the death of net neutrality and neutered FCC oversight to dominate smaller competitors and tilt the entire internet ecosystem in its favor.

While the DOJ lost its original case, it was quick to appeal late last year, highlighting how within weeks of the deal AT&T had jacked up prices on consumers and competitors like Dish Network, which says it was forced to pull HBO from its lineup because it could no longer afford the higher rates.

Critics of the merger had also pointed out how AT&T would likely use the deal to increasingly make content exclusive to its own service, making it harder for competitors to access it. If you'll recall, this was something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson also insisted wouldn't happen when addressing a Senate antitrust subcommittee pre-merger:

"Nor is there any reason to believe we could use Time Warner programming or AT&T networks to hurt related markets. Simply put, it would be irrational business behavior to do so. Time Warner's programming is more valuable when distributed to as many eyes as possible. Moreover, in order to have great programming, it is imperative that we attract great creative talent to develop it. The best way to attract that talent is through widespread distribution of Time Warner content."

Of course this week AT&T announced it would be taking content like Friends and making it exclusive to its own streaming platforms, including its new looming HBO Max service:

"AT&T will start restricting some Time Warner shows to its own streaming service, despite previously telling the government that it would distribute Time Warner content as widely as possible. WarnerMedia, the division AT&T created when it bought Time Warner, today announced a new online streaming service called "HBO Max." HBO Max will debut in the spring of 2020 and include exclusives that will no longer be available on other streaming platforms."

On its surface this doesn't seem like that big of a deal. After all, Friends is an old show, and most users probably won't care. And it's certainly not the only show getting this treatment (Comcast NBC Universal just made The Office exclusive to its streaming platform, and Disney is also pulling Netflix content for exclusive use on its own looming Disney+ service). But more broadly, the more essential content AT&T makes exclusive to its own platform (especially and likely inevitably, HBO), the more difficult it will be to compete with AT&T. Knowing AT&T, there's going to be far more exclusives where this came from.

This is all before you even get to net neutrality and AT&T's domination in broadband, which has allowed it to behave anti-competitively in different, even more problematic ways (like only imposing arbitrary usage caps if you use a competitor's service). Letting companies like Comcast NBC Universal and AT&T Time Warner dominate both the conduit and the content will ultimately result in a universe of headaches for competitors and consumers alike. And Judge Leon's failure to see (or acknowledge) this will be a "gift" that keeps on giving for the next decade.

The other major problem these ongoing exclusives have is they increasingly force consumers to hunt and peck through a growing, cumbersome list of subscription services just to find the content they're looking for. And if subscription price and ease of use isn't managed carefully, it's simply going to drive frustrated users back to piracy. And when that happens, history suggests these companies will blame everybody and everything (ban VPNS!) but themselves for it.

All of that said, I'm not sure banning exclusive content deals is the answer. What would be at least part the answer for maintaining healthier markets? Finally realizing that endless media consolidation and mindless mega-mergers are generally harmful to the media and telecom sector (as now AT&T owned HBO and DC comics employees are just starting to figure out post merger). And that the long list of promises made in the ramp up to such super unions are almost always uniformly empty. There are fifty years of data for clear supporting evidence, especially in telecom.

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Filed Under: content, friends, lies, mergers, promises, silos, streaming

Companies: at&t, hbo, netflix, time warner