Bright Promise and Dashed Hopes — The AT&T Media Strategy Saga

Big, expensive unions of large and unwieldy companies almost never work out well.

The sudden termination of CNN+ is but the latest casualty in a long history of things that began with a lot of confident predictions that eventually crumbled into “oh, never mind…” There are lessons to be learned in the AT&T / Time-Warner / Discovery saga.

It was 2016, just six short years ago. AT&T, in a move that delighted investment bankers, lobbyists and lawyers, (but not their own investors) dug deep into the piggy bank and announced an $84.5 billion deal to acquire Time Warner, Inc., a media and entertainment company. At the time, it was positioned as a dreamy deal that would generate not only substantial cost savings, but also growth! Take the assets of the nation’s second-largest wireless phone provider and combine these with beloved entertainment and news properties such as HBO, CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network and the Warner Bros. film and TV studio in Burbank and you could see a bright new universe of new business models and customer touch points.

Rosy assumptions and deep pockets

Randall Stephenson, the AT&T Chief, and Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner thought at the time that there was a billion of easy synergy savings to be captured. Moreover, that the acquisition would create a stronghold in the worlds of entertainment that couldn’t be copied because of AT&T’s…