It’s an AT&T kind of day — another noteworthy development of the newly enlarged telecom giant is the company’s late-2006 (and I meant very tail-end, as in the last ten days of the year) deployment of its controversial U-verse TV service in nine markets. AT&T had been promising to roll out the service to a total of at least 15 markets by year-end 2006, and it didn’t quite make it.
According to my tally, U-verse is now available in eleven markets (see table at end), and even then, only some small portions of those markets. But, give AT&T credit: in the space of one week, from December 21 through December 28, the telco launched commercial multichannel video service over its fiber-to-the-node networks in nine markets.
I suspect that AT&T’s overtime and time-and-a-half labor costs went through the roof, but at least it made a good-enough showing to not be embarassed.
| AT&T U-Verse Service Commercial Deployments | ||
| Date | State | Areas* |
| 26-Jun-06 | TX | San Antonio area, wider commercial deployment of "controlled launch." |
| 30-Nov-06 | TX | Houston-area neighborhoods. |
| 21-Dec-06 | CA | San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of the cities of Cupertino and Saratoga |
| 21-Dec-06 | CA | San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of the cities of San Ramon and Danville |
| 27-Dec-06 | CT | Hartford metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of Newington and Wethersfield |
| 27-Dec-06 | CT | Stamford metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of Danbury, Fairfield, Norwalk, Stamford and Trumbull. |
| 27-Dec-06 | CT | New Haven metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of Cheshire and Milford. |
| 28-Dec-06 | IN | Bloomington metropolitan statistical area (MSA). |
| 28-Dec-06 | IN | Anderson metropolitan statistical area (MSA). |
| 28-Dec-06 | IN | Indianapolis metropolitan statistical area (MSA), including parts of Beech Grove, Carmel, Fishers, Greenwood, Lawrence and Noblesville |
| 28-Dec-06 | IN | Muncie metropolitan statistical area (MSA). |
| *U-Verse available only in limited areas of the cities or MSAs cited. | ||
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:53 PM | Print | Comments (0)
I was updating my statistics on AT&T now that it has finally closed its merger with BellSouth. We all just accept that the new AT&T is a big company, and the merger’s opponents have, at times, painted the telco as a multi-tenacled sea monster capable of smashing down competition.
The fears sparked by the merger’s opponents are exaggerated, but there’s no getting around the fact that the new AT&T is just one big honking company. Take annual revenues —- for the last four quarters, AT&T and BellSouth combined generated $84.4 billion (see table at end), which would make the company around the 37th biggest corporation in the world, according to Fortune Global 500 rankings. The only other telecom company that tops AT&T on this measure is Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, which is expected to generate $94.9 billion in revenue for 2006. But the new AT&T is far more profitable than NTT — the combined company generated $10.6 billion in net income over the past four quarters, compared to NTT’s 2006 profit of only $4.4 billion.
AT&T also tops the U.S. mobile voice subscriber charts (58.7 million through Cingular, soon to be renamed AT&T, Wireless) and high-speed subscriptions (11.6 million DSL subscriptions at the end of Q3 06, compared to Comcast, which counted 11 million cable modem subscribers at the end of Q3 06).
I don’t believe, as some reports suggest, that AT&T is in the process of reassembling the old Ma Bell system, also known as, well, AT&T. Fueled by technological innovations, the marketplace has changed too dramatically for a single telecommunications company to ever again monopolize the growing array of communications services. But still, the new AT&T is big and a far more potent force than most companies in the world.
| Selected Key Statistics for Combined AT&T-BellSouth | |||||
| 3Q05 | 4Q05 | 1Q06 | 2Q06 | 3Q06 | |
| Total access lines (mil.) | 70.62 | 69.45 | 68.57 | 67.25 | 66.13 |
| DSL customers (000) | 9,174 | 9,803 | 10,577 | 11,047 | 11,597 |
| Video (000) | 879 | 980 | 1,119 | 1,224 | 1,342 |
| Wireless Voice Customers (000) | 52,292 | 54,144 | 55,810 | 57,308 | 58,666 |
| Total operating revenues (mil.) | $21,540 | $21,479 | $21,006 | $21,016 | $20,856 |
| Net Income (mil.) | $ 2,546 | $ 2,480 | $ 2,229 | $ 2,695 | $ 3,224 |
| Source: Emerging Media Dynamics, Inc. analysis of company data. © 2007. | |||||
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
AT&T has spilled some of its post-BellSouth merger strategic beans to the Wall Street Journal’s Amol Sharma and Almar Latour (article behind firewall here) and the watchword at the new telecom behemoth is wireless. On the heels of closing its $86 billion acquisition, AT&T is ramping up a new aggressive push on the wireless services front, with plans calling for now-fully-controlled Cingular Wireless to begin pitching corporate customers on advanced integrated services and wooing residential customers with bundled packages of cellphone and Internet services.
“The biggest asset we bought here was Cingular,” said Mr. Whitacre. “We’re about to become a company with wireless at its heart.”
AT&T will also begin cross-selling advertising across its multiple cellphone, TV and Internet platforms. Everything, including BellSouth and Cingular, will be rebranded under the AT&T name — ads will begin in mid-January with the tag line “Cingular is now the new AT&T.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:49 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The next big thing in social networking is live video webcasts, a logical progression in this hot phenomenon that was all but inevitable. The New York Times’ Brad Stone has this piece today about the new trend of swapping not just photos and comments, but also live videos, with friends and connections.
One rising social networking site, Stickam.com, is capturing attention for its feature that enables users to transmit live videos of themselves and participate in live video chats, something that can’t be done on MySpace or Facebook or even YouTube. Although many of the live chatters on Stickam appear to be blatantly hawking sexuality, the site does claim in its rules to bar nudity and will kick out any user who violates this prohibition. Stickam also contends that it will report to the authorities anybody who exposes sexually explicit material to minors.
Moreover, and I hear this a lot from web video companies, Stickam argues that video is safer than static material because, well, it’s difficult for a 45 year-old man to impersonate a 16 year-old boy on video.
Mr. Kihioka of Stickam [Hidecki Kihioka, CEO] said that in some respects, his site was actually safer than other social networks. Live video feeds let users “know who they are talking to,” he said. “Unlike MySpace, it is hard to disguise yourself.”
But, because of the live nature of the video chats, policing the unauthorized activity is difficult, raising a fresh crop of new concerns over the safety of social networking for minors. Stickam’s potential for abuse scared off MySpace, which blocked the service last fall (Stickam started out as a video chatting service geared to MySpace), but it hasn’t scared off big media companies.
Warner Brothers used the live video aspect of the site to transmit webcam feeds of two of its artists last month, drawing 9,500 viewers who engaged in chats with the perfomers during breaks. The commercial uses of live video on social networking sites smells to me like a major thing — live performances, live celebrity video chats and so forth.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:25 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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