Randy thought if he bought TW that the fiber optic network would appear on its own.
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Pretty simple., If you own the delivery network why not own what gets delivered. Profit big time. Also you can sell that content to others who deliver it and make more money.
It was part of a strategy to get a foot in the door on networks and devices that ATT didn't own whole driving down the cost of content. Ultimately, we would use this foot in the door to sell targeted advertising.
The advent of privacy laws, starting with GDPR, reduced the potential revenue of running an ad network. This is the same reason that Google is pushing its Google Workspace apps and Cloud Platform so hard while they take away free unlimited storage from the consumer products. The ad revenue is shrinking.for everyone.
All of it was ego driven!!
It's a poor student who cannot exceed his teacher. And for Randall that's Big Ed.
He tried to run Big Ed's playbook and buy another telco, but Obama blocked that. And dtv was a fizzle.
So how can he exceed his teacher? The clock is ticking.
His genius decision: in addition to controlling telecom, he's gonna make himself into a Hollywood mogul.
Even Big Ed couldn't pull that one off. Even Golden Boy could only dream of that level of adoration.
And Randall's secret superpower? The accountancy training he got in Oklahoma. Look out, world.
He would wow the stars with his command of nickels and pennies, and be the talk of the town. His pet pooch, stinky, would chase after any bad guys who threatened to rain on his parade. And he controlled the T board, so no one could stop him.
What could possibly go wrong?
Someone sold Randall and Stankey dream of being next Amazon and Google where advertising will be biggest driver of revenue if they purchased Time Warner.
They kept talking ad revenue. Created a entity named Xander.
It was all the gibberish buzzwords of new tech and software defined networks and Wall Street types with a mix of Harvard and Silicon Valley thrown in.
Randall was asked on a town hall where he finds the capital for network with all these investments and he laughed and said we still will.
At the end of any story, dollars and cents tell the truth. Fact they had to sell DirectV and reduce visions of ad revenue to barely worth mentioning shows how sadly naive our leaders are. Or how superficial and out of any depth of technology, network, distribution, content, advertising, cloud, they don’t get any of it.
They will sell Time Warner. Death by a thousand cuts. Time Warner is a huge media asset. AT&T has no idea how to take advantage of it.
Netflix and Disney are miles ahead. Next we sell CNN, then the classic movies and content, and finally the streaming service.
If you scroll the movie library of HBO Max you can see how rich the library is. Yet they don’t know how to personalize it. It is too sad if not criminally negligent. They ran away the genius of HBO creative mind for some nobody from Hulu to run the place. Nuff said.
Primarily for its content in order to compliment DTV. In their minds it was a logical next step after getting into satellite TV...BIG MISTAKE ON BOTH acquisitions!
To cross the road and get to the other side.