Stream TV Live with Vince Torres, Chief Marketing Officer at DIRECTV

Well, we've invested over $400 million over the last four years to make sure we have a robust streaming platform for our customers. And while satellite has been a great business for us and customers love their satellite service, largely what we sell today and what we provide for customers is streaming solutions. That is the growth side of our business and that's what we're focused on. And that is, of course, the fixation of your talking pigeons. And that's the fixation of our talking pigeons.

Well, the core of our streaming strategy is to provide more choice and flexibility for our customers. So in December we launched a free service that largely provides 110 channels of FAST content. We call it a premium video service, but you're hoping they'll step up but they got something to start with. Right. So they start with a free service and then we also have launched what we call genre packs. Genre packs are now more bite-size options for customers. So we have a My Entertainment genre pack that meshes together linear channels with their favorite shows. We got a Mi Español package. We got a My News genre pack. We got a My Sports genre pack. These are options that give customers more choice, more flexibility based on their budget for video.

Yeah. The key here is to provide customers with the type of content that they want to watch. Where they get it really shouldn't matter as much, right? That's a new understanding. It's very different from how we've done it before. Before, customers bought these big bundles of linear channels. You had all the... and now you have all these other apps. The reality is the customer just wants to get to the content that they want. I want my shows when I want it, where on whatever device. So we've embraced that. So much of where we've invested, I mentioned we've put a lot into our product investment, is in integrating and making it seamless for customers to get whether it's a linear channel that they want or whether it's a show that happens to be on whatever app on a broadcast network. How crazy would that be? So who does that? There's great content everywhere. We are in the golden age of content and there's so much content out there that most customers don't even know what's out there. So if you can personalize an experience for them, if you can surface content that's relevant to them independent on what app it may sit on, that integrated experience, that's what we're trying to build. That's what we're trying to market. That's the solution we're providing for our customers. And now you couple that with kind of skinnier options from a content perspective, right? And that's our future. That's key too. So you've got to be able to let them stair-step up instead of saying you got to take everything or nothing. Now you can take bits and pieces, put it together, build it how you want to build it. You have to put the power in the hands of the consumer. If you try to fight that and try to force something into their needs, you may be successful for a little while, but you're going to fail over the long term. So letting customers take control of what they want to watch and how much they want to pay and when they want to pay for it, but making it an easy experience for them, that's what we're here to do at Direct TV.

I do see change in the industry and you're starting to see it. I think it's a great industry to be in. As I mentioned, there's a lot of content. We provide a lot of value for customers. We just need the different players in the value chain to accept that and, like you mentioned, start working and accepting of what consumers want. Let the consumer dictate how we build solutions for them and then let's make the arrangements and set up the contracts that allow everybody to deliver the consumer's needs, not so focused on what the individual components of the business value chain want to do for their business.