Standing in for boss Dan York, Rob Thun, director of programming for AT&T, updated the iHollywood crowd on the telco’s IPTV Project Lightspeed, although, frankly, there wasn’t much in the way of new information about the “control market launch” that started in San Antonio last December. Asked from the audience about persistent rumors of problems with lead vendor Microsoft’s software, Thun, who moved over from Fox last fall, said he couldn’t comment about specific vendors but that everything was on schedule.
On the programming side, he repeated the company’s interest in offering a la carte but said it isn’t going anywhere. “We have sought a la carte but it’s not something that’s happening right now…. I’m not saying a la carte is dead but it’s not doing jumping jacks right now.”
AT&T offers more than 200 channels at present and hundreds of hours of VOD.
The quick version of future plans offers a reminder that AT&T isn’t really out of the starting gate: scale of plans, enter new markets, more channels, then high definition. With HD set prices dropping and interest growing, I’m not sure how long AT&T can delay and still be perceived as fully competitive against cable and satellite.
Thun and I spoke for a few minutes after his keynote. He’s new to this side of the table but says he got a good grounding by watching MSO programming pros Fred Dressler (Time Warner) and Matt Bond (Comcast). Having the telcos in the network marketplace adds another layer of leverage for some programmers. “I think they look at us as an opportunity more so than an easy mark. Everybody in the group came from positional leverage so they sort of know what’s real, what’s not real. รข
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