AT&T has announced that the company will begin beta testing a new, "wireless-centric" streaming video service in 2018. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference this week in New York, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stated that the telecom giant would be leveraging its looming $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner to help fuel the new service, which will be built on the back of the company's existing, DirecTV Now streaming service. Outside of that, Stephenson offered little in terms of hard detail about what such a service will look like.

Stephenson was however quick to highlight how high cable prices are fueling and obvious, though slow, exodus away from bloated and pricey traditional cable bundles.

“It’s a price issue,” Stephenson said of the slow erosion of pay TV customers. “Content costs continue to escalate, prices on the cable bundle continue to go up, so people are opting out of the cable bundle.”

Cord cutting has hit AT&T particularly hard, even with AT&T being more aggressive than other companies in terms of offering less expensive, streaming alternatives. Last quarter, the company lost 156,000 DirecTV satellite TV customers and 195,000 IPTV (formerly known as U-Verse) customers for a net loss of 351,000 “traditional” video subscribers. And while AT&T did manage to add 152,000 DirecTV Now streaming video customers, the additions weren't enough to counter the overall losses.

Enter AT&T's "wireless-centric" plans for streaming video.

“We concluded early on you need a wireless-centric approach to that market,” Stephenson said. “As soon as we closed DirecTV, we went to work getting the rights of all the content to deliver to a mobile device, it was the main benefit that came with DirecTV. And we were able to get these rights in very short order. Within a year we were standing up DirecTV Now, this is not a $115 bundle of content, this is a $30-to-$60 bundle of content. Here is a much lower-priced bundle of content that is well integrated with our wireless service, it’s created a very unique and I think compelling value proposition in the market.”

Again, what this new, "wireless-centric" service is going to look like isn't clear, but with AT&T successfully lobbying to kill net neutrality protections and hoovering up Time Warner despite widespread concerns of anti-competitive impact, don't be particularly shocked if the effort contains at least a few of AT&T's trademark "creative" flourishes designed to put competitors at a notable disadvantage.