Why Isn’t America Freaking Out About AT&T/DirecTV Merger — And Should We Be?

While pretty much everyone is scrutinizing the pending mega-merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable, not much attention is being paid to the possible marriage of the country’s second-largest wireless and pay-TV companies. And that leaves us with two big questions: What, if anything, makes these two mergers so different? And should we be more worried about a unified AT&T and DirecTV than we are?

Their arguments for merging

For the two companies, the benefits of a union are obvious.

AT&T began life as a telephone company and in many ways, that’s where its business still lies. They do DSL, fiber, and mobile connections. Although AT&T does provide TV services to U-verse subscribers, that’s not their biggest business by a long shot.

DirecTV, on the other hand, is the second largest pay-TV provider in the country, outranked only by our old friend Comcast. But in an era when more and more cord-cutters want to keep their broadband and stream their TV, instead of channel-surfing live, the future of their business starts to look dim. The company does not provide broadband connections of their own. Instead, they partner with providers — AT&T high among them — to frankenstein together double- and triple-play bundles.

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