DIRECTV TO STOP BUYING SATELLITES, TO FOCUS ON ONLINE VIDEO BUSINESS

AT&T, owner of DTH operator DirecTV, announced that is finished buying satellites. Instead, it will focus on growing its online video business. The announcement was made by John Donovan, CEO of AT&T Communications, in a meeting with analysts.“We’ve launched our last satellite,” Donovan said. In turn, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that AT&T has been investing “very aggressively” in OTT, as well as a build out of fiber in the United States.At the end of the third quarter of 2018, DirecTV had 19.6 million DTH subscribers in the United States, a fall of 359,000 in the period. However, its OTT DirecTV Now linear service added 49,000 customers and registered a total base of 1.8 million. In Latin America, the operator reported 13.8 million subscribers.