AT&T is very close to an agreement for a minority stake in DirecTV.
Both Bloomberg and CNBC Cited sources said AT&T is close to closing a deal with private equity firm TPG for $ 15 million. The news follows a report by New York Post in December, that AT&T had contracted TPG under an agreement after previous offers did not meet AT&T expectations. AT&T bought DirecTV for $ 49 billion in 2015, and it is possible that the company hoped to recover some of that. But DirecTV has also been bleeding clients for years, so that’s it.
An AT&T spokesman declined to comment.
Citing sources, CNBC said companies could announce the deal later this week. The output also reported that AT&T CEO John Stankey did not want to sell the company’s troubled son entirely, despite AT&T astronomical debt which is currently around $ 150 billion.
AT&T also bet heavily on its great HBO Max experiment, a strange mixture of licensed content, HBO content, Max’s originals and then all the stuff from WarnerMedia that was scrambled on the service as well. The service is AT&T’s answer to Netflix and Disney +, although active subscriptions to these services continue to grow – with 200 millions and 95 million subscriptions, respectively – while HBO Max reported more recently, it had 17.17 million “activated” users. Possibly Playing all Warner Bros. films. 2021 on service will help.
Of course, it is possible that the deal goes wrong. But perhaps AT&T will finally be able to turn its crumbling satellite company into someone else’s problem.
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