AT&T Says It Wants to Sell You Web TV, Too

We’ve been waiting for big, deep-pocketed players to join Dish’s Sling TV and sell pay TV over the Web. Now AT&T says that’s what it intends to do. AT&T isn’t offering up much detail — just that it wants to offer a couple different Web TV offerings, which will be sold across the country, in the fall of 2016. It won’t say what networks and programmers it is working with, and how much it wants to charge. The crucial thing it is saying is that, like Sling, the offering won’t be limited to people who already subscribe to AT&T’s broadband or mobile service, or AT&T’s DirecTV pay service: It will sell the service over the Web, via an app, without an annual contract. AT&T says it will have three different tiers of service. It is describing the most full-featured, one, confusingly named “DirecTV Now”, as something that sounds similar to traditional TV, or the “skinny bundle” that Dish sells via its Sling TV. There’s also a mid-tier service that’s supposed to offer a “mobile-first user experience” — which seems to mean “not as much video as you would get with traditional pay TV” – and then a free version, with a grab-bag of video.