DirecTV is back at it in the virtual MVPD race, making a promotional push, tied to the NCAA's "March Madness" basketball tournament, trying to gain ground for DirecTV Stream.
In addition to offering a five-day free trial -- which would get you at least through the "Round of 64," which starts Thursday -- DirecTV is discounting the first three months of service by $10 a month, to $59.99 for the base "Entertainment" tier.
All four four of the DirecTV Stream tiers, which top out at $139.99 a month (with $10 off promotion) for the 140-plus-channel "Premier" bundle, include CBS, CBS Sports, TNT, TBS and trueTV. Those are the channels that carry NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament games. Here's DirecTV's landing page for the service.
In addition to seeing aggressive online-only marketing promotions, Next TV received a DirecTV Stream mailer Tuesday in the U.S. Post -- it's the first time we can remember seeing a DirecTV-branded streaming service promoted this way in quite a while.
Also read: NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament 2022 - Where and How to Stream March Madness
Certainly, it's been a long, winding, promotionally fueled road for vMVPD services carrying the DirecTV brand. AT&T started down the path in November 2016, shortly after its ill-fated $49 billion purchase of DirecTV, launching a $35-a-month skinny-bundled live-streaming service DirecTV Now, infiltrating a market previously pioneered by satellite TV rival Dish Network and its Sling TV offering, along with Sony's now-defunct PlayStation Vue.
Fueled by aggressive promotions, many of them tied to AT&T's unlimited wireless products and some of them offering vMVPD service for now-unheard-of first-three-months-free price breaks, DirecTV grew like a weed, expanding to an industry-leading 1.8 million subscribers by August 2018.
It was right around then that AT&T, shifting its eyes to the shiny bauble of its subsequently more disastrous $85 billion Time Warner Inc. purchase, cut DirecTV Now off of its promotional sauce, souring on the fast-declining DirecTV brand in the process, and rechristening the vMVPD enterprise as "AT&T Now."
Then things got even more corporately convoluted, with AT&T shifting its pay TV focus to a kind of hybrid product, AT&T TV, which would combine virtual, IP-based distribution of video with the traditional contracts, fees and unwanted features consumers loathed.
AT&T Now had whittled to just 656,000 subscribers by the end of 2020, just before AT&T announced plans to spin off its entire pay TV portfolio in a joint venture with private equity company TPG, a JV the telecom would own on a 70% basis.
The newly configured DirecTV now distributes one IP-based service, DirecTV Stream, which adds taxes to its listed monthly price, but has seemingly dispensed with regional network fees and other surcharges. (Note that we're assuming this is true -- we haven't actually test-driven the service for a few years.)
Notably, DirecTV Stream still offers a proprietary Android TV-based set-top on a $5-a-month lease, but leasing this device appears optional.
AT&T last publicly reported a combined subscriber count for DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV streaming and legacy U-verse TV platforms at the end of Q2 of 2021, so it's unclear as to how many subscribers its virtual pay TV platforms have at this point.
With market leaders YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV also offering all the networks anyone would need to watch March Madness -- and much closer to critical-mass scale at nearly 4 million users each (estimated in the case of YouTube TV) -- it's unclear as to whether the vMVPD market is too saturated at this point for DirecTV to re-establish a niche.
