AT&T Is Killing Off AT&T TV Now, Its Skinny-Bundle Television Package

AT&T has thrown in the towel in trying to compete for cord-cutters looking for a cheap TV bundle — an unsurprising move as the telco tries to shore up its struggling pay-TV business.

In an update on its website this week, the telco said it is no longer selling AT&T TV Now to new customers. “AT&T TV Now has merged with AT&T TV to bring you the best live and on-demand experience!” a message on the telco’s site says. The AT&T TV broadband-delivered product, introduced last spring, is priced and packaged more like traditional cable and satellite TV and is designed as a replacement for the steadily declining DirecTV satellite service.

The phasing out of AT&T TV Now comes after years of shifting strategies and a confusing mélange of marketing messaging. AT&T first launched the skinny-bundle service in December 2016, originally called DirecTV Now, stuffed with 100-plus channels for an eye-popping intro price of $35 per month. But the attempt to win cord-cutters backfired, as AT&T steadily hiked the prices of the over-the-top package and the early adopters dropped the package in droves.

AT&T TV Now most recently was priced started at $55/month for 45-plus channels, and a tier including HBO Max started at $80/month with more than 60 channels. The company said existing AT&T TV Now customers will continue to have access to the service, for now. AT&T TV, designed around a purpose-built Android TV set-top, starts at monthly prices of $70, $85 and $95, the top two packages which include HBO Max for one year at no extra cost.

An AT&T rep didn’t respond to a request for more info on on the change.

At its peak, DirecTV Now (later rebranded as AT&T TV Now) had 1.86 million in the third quarter of 2018. Over the next two years, it shed 63% of those, to stand at 683,000 at the end of Sept. 30, 2020.

AT&T first launched DirecTV Now in late 2016. At the time, AT&T’s then-CEO Randall Stephenson had promised that the skinny-bundle strategy would disrupt the pay-TV biz with revolutionary pricing, dramatically undercutting other TV providers. “[W]e are absolutely convinced that this is going to be very, very attractive for a large group of customers who really aren’t even in the market today,” Stephenson told investors in November 2016.

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