Timing is everything. But then again, I’m not the first person to say that. When I look back at the stuff I’ve written on this blog, there are a lot of articles about things that were simply before their time. In this case, I’m talking about AT&T Watch TV, a service you’ve either never heard of or completely forgotten.
Take a minute to jog your memory
Jake Buckler, scoundrel that he is, told us all about AT&T Watch TV when it launched in 2018. It was a simple idea. About 30 channels of live TV, streaming only, for about $15 a month. It was even cheaper if you had one of AT&T’s top cellular plans… in fact it was free and you got to select a free premium channel too.
And honestly, these weren’t garbagey channels like some of the ones you find on Pluto or Sling. These were the same channels you got on so-called basic cable. No locals, but some darn good national channels.
The service never caught on. The timing was wrong, people weren’t ready for it, and the streaming device support wasn’t very robust. It shut for good at the end of 2021, and practically no one read the article when I told you about it. That tells you how little anyone cared about the little service that wasn’t.
Would something like this work today?
I think it just might. Today the FAST (free ad-supported TV) craze means everyone is trying to create packages of free channels on phones and streaming boxes. In some cases this is the same content you get on pay-TV, just repackaged. People love it because they’re tired of paying $20 for one streaming app that doesn’t even have a lot on it. I totally understand.
Today, for better or worse, traditional pay-TV is shrinking at a faster rate than before. I’m not one of those naysayers who say it will be gone in 5 years. Ask me in 15 years and I might have another tale to tell. But I don’t think it’s collapsing quite that quickly.
On the other hand, it seems like every week we hear about a small pay-TV operation shutting down and trying to move their customers to a high-priced live TV streaming service like YouTube TV. That’s not a win for anyone. These are people who would have already cut the cord if that’s what they wanted to do. They didn’t, and now they’re being forced to, at a price that’s more than they want to pay.
I think a $15 package of basic channels with a little DVR or on demand thrown in could be a winner. Package it with a bunch of FAST channels, much like Sling does with its lower-end packages, and you just might have something there.
But I don’t know if we’ll ever know.
A lot of the channels in the old AT&T Watch TV package (a terrible name, by the way, and that probably didn’t help either) are owned now by Warner Bros. Discovery. At the time, they were owned by AT&T, which is why the consumer price was so low. WBD doesn’t seem to care about traditional pay TV, despite their protestations to the contrary. They want you to spend $20 a month for Max, which has a lot of that same content on demand and may add live streams soon. They’ll probably raise the price when it does. So you’ll get all that content, yes, but you won’t get other content from non-Warner properties.
If AT&T Watch TV launched in 2023, maybe with a different name, it might have just had a chance. Pity, because its time has already come and gone.
