Over the longer term, most consumer advocates believe the AT&T Time Warner merger will be a bad thing for overall competition, as AT&T inevitably jacks up the price of "must have" content licensing (like HBO) for its streaming competitors, and uses the death of net neutrality to similarly hamstring threats to its own businesses in a variety of "creative" new ways. But in the meantime, AT&T is trying to soften the PR edges of its merger by promising to launch a new $15 TV service next week that will be free for the company's wireless subscribers.
Dubbed
AT&T Watch, the $15 service is primarily being used as a way to incentivize users to switch to AT&T wireless, where the service will be free.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson tells CNBC's Squak Box that more detail on the product should drop sometime this week.
Company executives have previously described AT&T Watch as a "very low end, very thin collection of products" that will take "some of the Turner video channels and bundle them with a small number of other channels and put a very small product for a customer base who is looking for that value and have a price point in the $15 range."
Similar products, like Discovery, A&E and FX's Philo, are already on the market. But AT&T's domination in wireless will allow the company to offer its own service to its wireless users for free, giving it a major leg up in direct competition with these challengers. Still, the channel lineup is so limited it's unclear just how much of an appeal AT&T Watch will have.
Meanwhile, with the death of net neutrality, AT&T also has been given the green light by the Trump administration to use its domination of fixed and wireless broadband to erect new impediments to streaming competitors like Netflix, Amazon, or numerous smaller startups. AT&T isn't likely to behave badly at first for fear of providing ammo to looming lawsuits over the rules, but should the FCC prevail in court, AT&T's
ethically dubious history makes it abundantly clear the company will be using its newfound regulatory freedom to full anti-competitive advantage in time.