AT&T now owns Batfleck, Harry Potter
AT&T and Time Warner are going to merge because of course they were. On Tuesday a judge ruled in favor of the merger in a suit brought by the Department of Justice to halt AT&T from owning The Hall of Justice.
This means AT&T now controls phones, DirecTV, DirecTV Now, UVerse/ISP stuff, and the Time Warner catalog of movies which include series such as Harry Potter, the DC universe films, Nightmare on Elm Street, Rocky, The Matrix, and many others.
For AT&T customers this means you’ve got an exceptional catalog of films that will probably be offered up to you in one form or another.
For non-AT&T customers this probably means they’re going to incentivise you to come to DirecTV Now and AT&T by holding the TW catalog over there and saying “let’s talk about your phone service before we start talking about Hogwarts.”
Being owners of many beloved movie franchises, chances are you’ll also see some commercials for their phone and streaming services dredging up Jason Vorhees, or perhaps they’ll just force Ben Afleck to sell the carrier-specific AT&T Batphone.
With the current demise of Net Neutrality and the immediate consolidation of two seemingly unrelated businesses I can’t help but think there’s some sort of Ready Player One (movie,) advertising angle about to happen.
That said, I’m interested to see what happens here now that AT&T owns the company that purchased and then sold AOL to Verizon. What I’m not interested in is to hear the phone tree menu when you call ATT for technical support on anything.
“For phone internet press or say 1, for fiber internet press or say 2, for complaints about how dark the Justice League movies are press or say 3, for streaming issues press or say 4, for satellite TV press or say 5, for DirecTV now press or say 6” etc..
[Market Watch]
