[Steveknj]

That cost is fixed regardless of the size of the customer base. Streaming is traffic sensitive.

So it could potentially be lower that Sat? Sure more customers will increase cost, but it will also increase revenue, so that's a wash. That's how most businesses on the planet work. More customers mean more widgets need to be purchased, a bigger venue for manufacturing and customers, and that's how you grow.

 

[SledgeHammer]

You think there's ZERO costs maintaining a Sat infrastructure? What planet are you living on? Forget even maintaining everything on the DirecTV side of things (Satellites, and everything that goes with it), but what about all the equipment in the wild? Cabling, Sat Receivers, the dish, the staff to make home visits (which is VERY expensive comparatively. There is NONE of that with streaming. Customer can use their own device which is not DirecTV's responsibility, or use an Osprey which again, the customer purchases and has a limited warranty that and after that their responsibility ends unless the customer pays. So I'd say the cost is a wash most likely. As for the cost to the customer, it depends on the customer and situation, which we've discussed over and over here. For some with limited number of TVs Sat is still cheaper, for others who need multiple viewing options, streaming is cheaper. I agree, the prices will go up, but they will for Sat too.

Maintaining all the customer equipment likely costs DirecTV nothing and is probably a very lucrative side hustle for them.

1) all the suckers paying into PP and end up never/rarely using it -- if you're paying into PP for 12 months out of the year and you need a service call once in 5 yrs, you're extremely deep in the red
2) if you don't have PP, YOU pay for a truck roll, not for DirecTV -- if you whine, they may comp it...
3) tech savvy people will just pay/fix themselves -- replace hard drives, or wiring, etc. I had a SWM go bad, not gonna call DirecTV for that unless it was on the roof. Cheaper and faster to buy & replace the SWM myself and less hassle then waiting around all day for a sweaty dude to show up 3 hrs late.

Never said there was "ZERO" cost with Sat. I said streaming costs more.

 

[SledgeHammer]

So it could potentially be lower that Sat? Sure more customers will increase cost, but it will also increase revenue, so that's a wash. That's how most businesses on the planet work. More customers mean more widgets need to be purchased, a bigger venue for manufacturing and customers, and that's how you grow.

No. 4K and 20 streams requires a lot of infrastructure that costs a lot of AWS $$$. You should check out the AWS cost estimators. They nickel & dime you on EVERYTHING.

How does (theoretically) adding 20 HR54s to your account cost DirecTV ANYTHING? Not like you are sucking more bits out of the air and they need to throw up another bird to accommodate. A sat doesn't care if 1 person is using it or 100M people are using it. Streaming does. And not mentioned yet, but cable also cares since you put additional drain on the infrastructure.

Sat is very cost efficient that way...

 

[SledgeHammer]

You needed Markie's character to be Dan's foil. But I agree, there's a reason why they had 3-4 different Public Defenders and that's because any of them work in that role.

The one in the pilot got replace, the first season one girl got fired due to creative differences. The second black one I think quit or got pushed out. I believe the producers always wanted Markie, but she wasn't available at first. I think Fall Guy if I recall? Yeah, she's everyones favorite though.

 

[SledgeHammer]

With Sat, you have to maintain and replenish hardware.

As mentioned in another thread the other stuff you mentioned is all covered and profitable for them. You need a box for their streaming service... or, per this forum, that's the recommended approach.

DirecTV hasn't released new hardware in years. This thread is the first inkling of anything new in a long, long time.

They also haven't added any features to the DVRs in years, its just in maintenance mode and likely covered by a few developers that are probably only working on it part time.

I am a software engineer and I can tell you that's how it works on a maintenance mode project. Management gets into the if it ain't broke, don't fix it mode and do as little as possible on it. But they keep 1 or 2 devs on it to babysit it. I used to work at a company where the project went from 8 devs to just me baby sitting it part time. Very part time. I literally spent about 1 - 2 minutes on it per day.

 

[Steveknj]

Maintaining all the customer equipment likely costs DirecTV nothing and is probably a very lucrative side hustle for them.

1) all the suckers paying into PP and end up never/rarely using it -- if you're paying into PP for 12 months out of the year and you need a service call once in 5 yrs, you're extremely deep in the red
2) if you don't have PP, YOU pay for a truck roll, not for DirecTV -- if you whine, they may comp it...
3) tech savvy people will just pay/fix themselves -- replace hard drives, or wiring, etc. I had a SWM go bad, not gonna call DirecTV for that unless it was on the roof. Cheaper and faster to buy & replace the SWM myself and less hassle then waiting around all day for a sweaty dude to show up 3 hrs late.

Never said there was "ZERO" cost with Sat. I said streaming costs more.

OK, it's a waste of my time arguing this. It costs nothing, sure, sending people to people's homes to install or fix (often in deal that make it at the company's expense costs nothing. Recycling old equipment costs nothing. Having banks and banks of CSRs available costs nothing. EVERY infrastructure has some costs, some are fixed costs, some are dependent on other factors. The beancounters figure all of that out. I don't know what the costs of both are, but I can only go by what the CEOs (both AT&T and the new management have been saying) and they both have said that the model where you have to have line pulls and Sat installations and multiple instances of DirecTV supported hardware is not a cost effective solution. It's expensive to maintain fleets of contracted workers to do these installation, it's expensive to keep hardware inventory on hand, it's expensive to keep fixing bugs in software and it's expensive to keep a staff of CSRs and train them, and, it's expensive to have a customer base who often expects a ton of freebies to stay. While there is infrastructure costs for streaming too, there's NO home visits, hardware is offered by not required and is OWNED by the customer, most issues are caused by internet issues, or router issues that are not DirecTV's responsibility. And for consumers the cost may or may not be less for streaming, depending on their own situations. Thus, what works for you, doesn't work for me. If this wasn't the case, why require customers to be on a two year contract? Because the cost of bringing that customer onboard requires they stay for two years. Heck even if you quit, there's a cost to DirecTV to send all your crap back to them, where streaming is one call, and it's done.

But yeah, you love sat and don't want to change. I get that, and you'll defend it as long as it works for you. I get that too. I also never believed that a streaming OTT service would ever work for me. It worked fine. It's not the reason I went back. It was just missing a couple of key channels. Once those are there, I'll go back to streaming (once my contract is up).

 

[Steveknj]

No. 4K and 20 streams requires a lot of infrastructure that costs a lot of AWS $$$. You should check out the AWS cost estimators. They nickel & dime you on EVERYTHING.

How does (theoretically) adding 20 HR54s to your account cost DirecTV ANYTHING? Not like you are sucking more bits out of the air and they need to throw up another bird to accommodate. A sat doesn't care if 1 person is using it or 100M people are using it. Streaming does. And not mentioned yet, but cable also cares since you put additional drain on the infrastructure.

Sat is very cost efficient that way...

There's no 4k on DirecTV streaming that I'm aware of.

 

[SledgeHammer]

OK, it's a waste of my time arguing this. It costs nothing, sure, sending people to people's homes to install or fix (often in deal that make it at the company's expense costs nothing. Recycling old equipment costs nothing. Having banks and banks of CSRs available costs nothing. EVERY infrastructure has some costs, some are fixed costs, some are dependent on other factors. The beancounters figure all of that out. I don't know what the costs of both are, but I can only go by what the CEOs (both AT&T and the new management have been saying) and they both have said that the model where you have to have line pulls and Sat installations and multiple instances of DirecTV supported hardware is not a cost effective solution. It's expensive to maintain fleets of contracted workers to do these installation, it's expensive to keep hardware inventory on hand, it's expensive to keep fixing bugs in software and it's expensive to keep a staff of CSRs and train them, and, it's expensive to have a customer base who often expects a ton of freebies to stay. While there is infrastructure costs for streaming too, there's NO home visits, hardware is offered by not required and is OWNED by the customer, most issues are caused by internet issues, or router issues that are not DirecTV's responsibility. And for consumers the cost may or may not be less for streaming, depending on their own situations. Thus, what works for you, doesn't work for me. If this wasn't the case, why require customers to be on a two year contract? Because the cost of bringing that customer onboard requires they stay for two years. Heck even if you quit, there's a cost to DirecTV to send all your crap back to them, where streaming is one call, and it's done.

But yeah, you love sat and don't want to change. I get that, and you'll defend it as long as it works for you. I get that too. I also never believed that a streaming OTT service would ever work for me. It worked fine. It's not the reason I went back. It was just missing a couple of key channels. Once those are there, I'll go back to streaming (once my contract is up).

Same ol' Steve . Somebody disagrees with you and you start flailing around making ridiculous, inaccurate comments.

You're still missing the big picture and the costs of things and how other things pay for yet other things.

If they roll a sweaty dude to your house to show up 3 hours late, does he get paid? Yes, by his employer who happens to be DirecTV.

Does DirecTV roll a sweaty dude to your house to show up 3 hours late for free? No. You've either paid the sweaty dude to show up at your house 3 late through PP many times over or through a one time fee.

Does a one time fee pay for the sweaty dude's entire salary? Duh. No. Do all the people who pay in to the PP and never use it pay for the sweaty dude's entire salary? Probably.

Does DirecTV give you hardware for free? No. You pay a $199 fee and then $7/mo for it. I've had DirecTV for 20 yrs. That means I've paid $199 + 12 x 20 = $1872 (first box free). Do you really think it costs them $1872 for a box?

Then you bring up the recycling of returned boxes? Come on now Steve, now you're flailing again. They don't do anything with them. They blow the dust off and test the box quickly. If it works, they ship it out to a another customer for yet ANOTHER $199 fee plus $7/mo. If they don't work, they might replace the HD. If that doesn't work, they likely toss them.

Lease fees and the $199 fee have paid for every box in existence many, many times over. That's well known. If they've been paid for many, many times over, wouldn't it mean that after paying for them 2 or 3 times, its all gravy?

You're talking about bean counters, but you still haven't explained why most streaming services are in the deep red.

Seems like the issue is that you don't understand how cloud costs work and scale to the user base where as Sat doesn't.

 

[SledgeHammer]

to keep a staff of CSRs and train them

Oh man, I missed that part the first time around. Good one Steve!!!

 

[Steveknj]

Seems like the issue is that you don't understand how cloud costs work and scale to the user base where as Sat doesn't.

The answer to that is simple......They are paying too much for content and lowballing their prices to bring in customers. it's as simple as that. Nobody ever said that the prices won't go up. They will. So will DirecTV Satellite. Why? Because it costs a lot of money for content and these channels, for now the content providers (i.e. the cable channels) are not going to give a discount even though their viewership has decreased, and ESPECIALLY since advertising will dry up too and they will need to make that up from someone. And if they actually say screw it, we are going to let that channel go, people will scream bloody murder. Especially stations like ESPN which have loyal followings.

I am also in the software business and I fully understand what you are saying. But I also understand business and how it works. Once you have less and less subs, the fixed costs per subscriber go up. They don't magically go away. That's why I said, there's potential that it could cost LESS per subscriber eventually for streaming. I would imagine a company with the size and scale of DirecTV might get much better rates than whatever company you work with for things like AWS and so forth and thus those costs are more manageable than the types of costs you are seeing. Obviously I don't know who you work for so that's impossible for me to say for certain.

 

[SledgeHammer]

The answer to that is simple......They are paying too much for content and lowballing their prices to bring in customers. it's as simple as that. Nobody ever said that the prices won't go up. They will. So will DirecTV Satellite.

Yup. They raise them every Jan/Feb usually by 4-5% in my case. More if you include my out the door pricing. Streamers raise it by 25%.

All I'm saying is that the prices will eventually balance out between the two, so it'll really come down to your arbitrary personal preference. DirecTV will go away when the sats die if they don't replace them. Or assuming they haven't merged with Dish by then.

Why? Because it costs a lot of money for content and these channels, for now the content providers (i.e. the cable channels) are not going to give a discount even though their viewership has decreased, and ESPECIALLY since advertising will dry up too and they will need to make that up from someone. And if they actually say screw it, we are going to let that channel go, people will scream bloody murder. Especially stations like ESPN which have loyal followings.

AT&T believed they could renegotiate pricing with the combined user base, but that didn't pan out.

I am also in the software business and I fully understand what you are saying. But I also understand business and how it works. Once you have less and less subs, the fixed costs per subscriber go up. They don't magically go away.

Fair enough if you want to spin it that way. $X million / 15M users has a lower cost per user then $X million / 13M users. Even though X = X. A more valid point is they may get better deals with 15M vs. 13M, but who knows how the brackets work there and I suspect if Party A had 15M and Party B had 15M they probably wouldn't be paying Content Provider A the same rate if somebody in Party A belongs to somebody in Provider A's bridge club, etc.

That's why I said, there's potential that it could cost LESS per subscriber eventually for streaming. I would imagine a company with the size and scale of DirecTV might get much better rates than whatever company you work with for things like AWS and so forth and thus those costs are more manageable than the types of costs you are seeing. Obviously I don't know who you work for so that's impossible for me to say for certain.

The company I work for is quite a bit more powerful then DirecTV , so I'd wager we're getting better pricing. The team I'm on is a relatively small cog in the overall machinery and we're paying about $600K/mo in AWS costs just for our stuff.

 

[slice1900]

True to some extent, but also consider the cost of maintaining a Sat customer is much higher than a streaming customer. With Sat, you have to maintain and replenish hardware, you may need to do dish maintenance and other things that may require a home visit. You have NONE of that with streaming and the vast majority of issues are probably internet related and thus have little to do with DirecTV. So from a cost standpoint the sooner they move customers to streaming the better.

Whatever "maintaining and replenishing hardware" might add up to, it is paid for 10x over by the $8 per box per month fee you pay, and the $15 per month fee for the Genie.

Directv is much more profitable than Directv Stream, because of all those fees it adds that are almost all profit. That's the biggest reason they don't want to "migrate" anyone off satellite, even if they could guarantee they'd land on Stream and stay there.

 

[SledgeHammer]

Whatever "maintaining and replenishing hardware" might add up to, it is paid for 10x over by the $8 per box per month fee you pay, and the $15 per month fee for the Genie.

Directv is much more profitable than Directv Stream, because of all those fees it adds that are almost all profit. That's the biggest reason they don't want to "migrate" anyone off satellite, even if they could guarantee they'd land on Stream and stay there.

Yup.

Outlet fees = free money
PP = mostly free money
WHDVR fee = free money
HD fee = free money
DVR fee = free money
Box $199 fee = free money

 

[harsh]

OK, it's a waste of my time arguing this. It costs nothing, sure, sending people to people's homes to install or fix (often in deal that make it at the company's expense costs nothing.

You speak as if there isn't going to be any need to replace DIRECTV STREAM devices.

Recycling old equipment costs nothing.

It isn't cost-free, but it beats the daylights out of designing and building new equipment.

Having banks and banks of CSRs available costs nothing.

What makes you think that supporting relatively large number of wildly different streaming boxes is going to require less manpower? When you put the hardware responsibility in the lap of the customer, it doesn't make supporting their choices any easier.

 

[NashGuy]

Directv is much more profitable than Directv Stream, because of all those fees it adds that are almost all profit. That's the biggest reason they don't want to "migrate" anyone off satellite, even if they could guarantee they'd land on Stream and stay there.

The problem for DirecTV, of course, is that people DO keep migrating off their satellite TV service. About 2 million of them each year for a few years now. And I expect that number will be even higher in 2023, after the loss of NFL Sunday Ticket.

It doesn't matter how efficient or profitable a service is if no one wants it any more. The good ol' days for the cable TV industry -- whether delivered via coax or DBS -- are ending. People are shifting to lower cost, lower profit margin services, whether DTC streaming services like Netflix or vMVPDs like YouTube TV. And DirecTV knows that over time, nearly all their satellite customers with home broadband (except for a few die-hard DBS enthusiasts) will dump them for some streaming service or another. So DirecTV Stream is their attempt to retain at least some of those customers. Maybe they'd prefer their sat customers to stick around until the last bird dies but they know almost none will. So better to try to convert you into a Stream customer than lose you completely.

Given the installation/acquisition costs of new sat customers, and the amount of churn that exists, I can believe that DirecTV Stream might be as profitable for them as a new sat customer is over the first two years of service, i.e. the length of their initial contract. Beyond that, probably not. But then, given the rate at which the industry, and especially DirecTV satellite service, is losing customers, they're probably not much concerned about a longer time horizon than that. TPG is almost certainly not concerned with longer than that as they bought their stake a year ago and reportedly want to be out within 3 years. So right now is all about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, getting the books tidied up as best they can, to try to position the company for some kind of M&A deal.

 

[P Smith]

I'm wondering where is more info about new DTV hardware ?!

 

[harsh]

I'm wondering where is more info about new DTV hardware ?!

Since the "facts" of this discussion came uniquely from parsing the text of a third-party customer survey, you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for authoritative technical information.

 

[harsh]

People are shifting to lower cost, lower profit margin services, whether DTC streaming services like Netflix or vMVPDs like YouTube TV.

I submit that it is the content owners that are seeking to make more profit on their content by going DTC rather than spreading profits around through more costly multi-party distribution schemes.

 

[CraigerM]

One thing I was thinking about letting the C71-KW and A21-KW work with the HS-17 and HR-54 could those boxes be able to have the Satellite TV settings like view signal strength and whole home DVR, ect? Also View the HS-17 and HR-54's TV Apps?

 

[P Smith]

So, that mentioned HS27 wouldn't materialize ?