AT&T Chief John Stankey Rips Streaming Rivals For Low ARPU And Hiding “Behind The Screen” Of Amazon
deadline.comIn a conference call with Wall Street analysts, AT&T CEO John Stankey defended the decision to separate HBO Max from Amazon’s channels business.While the move last year caused a significant short-term loss of subscriber momentum, the gain in control of data and customer insight will pay off in the long term, the executive maintained.
Other companies, he noted, are claiming to have direct access to consumers but instead rely on Amazon and other tech giants to do the heavy lifting.“Better to have them there while you have direct access and control of them and can market to them and know what they’re doing than to have it be in some black box where you absolutely have no idea what somebody else is doing with aggregating your content and your exposure to your customer,” Stankey said.
Without naming names, he added, “There are a lot of entities out there that are growing, quote-unquote, ‘direct-to-consumer’ customers that are behind the screen of the Amazon marketplace that really are Amazon’s DTC customers.
They are not the media company’s DTC customers.”He also took a not-very-veiled shot at Disney and other competitors on the lower end of the price spectrum.
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