The HBO battle of AT & T and Dish is the dark future of cable and streaming

Yesterday, Dish's customers lost access to HBO due to an ongoing licensing dispute between the premium cable channel and the television distributor. This is the first time in HBO's more than 40 years history that it's dark. This kind of thing seems to happen occasionally in the cable industry, but it may also be the first clue of the cable nightmare that could be closed in the future if companies like Comcast, AT & T and Disney take control. ever larger pieces of the media landscape.

HBO is owned by WarnerMedia, which was acquired as part of AT & T's massive acquisition of Time Warner earlier this year. At the time when AT & T argued that it should be allowed to merge, one of the complaints of the Department of Justice was that AT & T could exploit its content ownership to keep users out of services streaming such as Sling TV to its own DirecTV Now service. .

Of course, AT & T said he would never do such a thing because it would bring him money. The government did not respond favorably, prompting Justice Richard Leon to reject the argument, stating that "the benefits of having AT & T customers access virtual MVPD content continue to benefit even when use DirecTV Now's competitors like Sling and YouTube TV.

But suddenly, the complaint of the Ministry of Justice began to appear much more convincing. With that in mind, the Dish quarrel continues to look less like a regular battle over subscription fees and more like that of AT & T that requires more money to carry its chains – from the Money that Dish would rather not pay.

WarnerMedia is pleased to send customers to a cable company that will pay its prices or meet its quota of subscribers. As HBO commented in its reaction to Dish's decision, "We hope the situation of DISH will change soon, but in the meantime, our valued customers should take advantage of other ways to access an HBO subscription to continue to enjoy our acclaimed programming. . In other words: he knows you'll always pay for HBO. And if Dish does not pay, he will send you to someone who will do it.

And even in some sort of unthinkable scenario and scorched earth where suddenly no cable company or streaming service wants to pay AT & T's price for HBO and Game of thrones, it is good too. It simply means that more users will be drawn into the welcoming arms of DirecTV, DirecTV Now and HBO Now, owned by AT & T.

Or why do business with cable companies when you could create your own streaming service to distribute all your content in one consolidated package? It's like what AT & T's WarnerMedia plans to launch in 2019, combining the likes of HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. in an "HBO Plus" style service.

In the first announcement of this service, John Stankey, CEO of WarnerMedia, said the company would continue to balance existing contracts with cable and satellite distributors alongside the new service. But if the dispute over Dish is an example for the future, it's easy to imagine a world in which AT & T uses the power of its properties to simply ask distributors for the funds they want, or leave them in the future. dust.

This type of difficult trading will become more and more common as more and more entertainment companies start to network with network owners. When you own the content and you have a network to distribute it, the calculation starts to change when you consider that other companies have a part of it when these customers could pay you instead. We are already seeing the beginning of it: Disney pulls its content from Netflix for its own streaming service.

Some of the results of these movements are a little innocent on the surface. Free HBO with your AT & T subscription. The X-Men appear in Marvel movies, which sounds good. Streaming services may not count in your cell phone bills, which is also nice. But the free benefits and fun things mark the beginning of a slippery slope that ends in extremely compartmentalised media empires that do not compete for services or prices simply because they are not forced to do so. Imagine the type of competitive blocking achieved by the Internet in the United States, but apply it also to streaming networks.

HBO / WarnerMedia / AT & T state that it is only as if nothing had happened. According to WarnerMedia, Dish had the opportunity to extend its former contract even before the start of the AT & T merger negotiations, adding that it was Dish's decision to remove the signal, not HBO. WarnerMedia also said that Dish had long used channel processing interruptions as an uncompromising bargaining tactic, which may still be true: Dish's customers silenced Black News in 2014, CBS in 2017, and Univision has been blacked out for the last three months.

It is always possible that this is a common dispute and that AT & T and Dish will face it before the end of the weekend. But as these types of business conglomerates continue to grow and develop with more and more competing streaming services, the potential of AT & T and WarnerMedia (and their contemporaries) only makes grow. And if these problems have not already begun to arise, it is virtually guaranteed that they will be in the future. When it's done, it's the customers who will be caught in the middle.