AT&T: Consumer bundle hangs on video, but mobile differentiates

ORLANDO -- Giving customers a better TV experience than competitors is the most important part of a consumer bundled service strategy, but including mobile service into that strategy can provide an edge against cable providers, Jeff Weber, AT&T’s (NYSE: T) vice president of video products, told a keynote crowd at the TelcoTV show today.

Win the customer on your video service, he said, and the other services will likely follow. More than 90% of AT&T’s video subscribers also subscribe to its broadband service, and more than 60% subscribe to its voice-over-IP service.

“Customers make the decision based on TV, which is why it’s so important to have better TV than your competitors,” Weber said. “When they make the decision on TV, broadband and voice -- to the extent they want it -- comes with it. You have to be great in TV.”

Weber left out wireless service in that description, admitting later that, as VP of video products, he sees AT&T as “a TV company with a little wireless on the side” and that some of his coworkers might see it the other way around.

But Weber did include the iPhone as part of the U-Verse TV experience, pointing to the app for remote DVR control and that for AT&T’s live mobile coverage of the US Masters golf tournament. And he said extending DVR control and TV-based applications to mobile devices in particular is an offering that is hard to match for cable competitors.

Weber pointed to DVR features as a key way to improve that all-important video experience: the ability to not only consume DVR content on multiple devices but control them from multiple devices. DVR consumption is rising rapidly because AT&T made these things easy to do, Weber said.

He also pointed to applications such as the integrated fantasy football application from Yahoo Sports and the recent Dallas Mavericks game for which AT&T let users control their own camera angle.

“The feeds are already coming in,” he said. “We’re just playing with software. But as a customer, I have a much deeper experience with the game.”