Less than a week ago, AT&T and its subsidiary WarnerMedia shook up the business model of the movie industry in a serious way, announcing that they will make Warner Brothers’ entire 2021 film slate available on the streaming service HBO Max, in addition to releasing them in theaters at the same time (WarnerMedia owns both HBO Max and the Warner Brothers movie studio.) The move has angered movie theater owners, the studio’s production partners, and even director Christopher Nolan.

On Tuesday, AT&T’s CEO, John Stankey, appeared at an industry conference, where he addressed these issues and more. 

Speaking virtually at the UBS Global TMT Conference, Stankey said positive things about where HBO Max stands. 

“I am really pleased at where we are with HBO Max,” Stankey said, per a transcript published by Seeking Alpha. "I know there is a lot of noise out there in the market that different people have different points of view on that. But if you go back and you look at what we communicated last October is to what our objectives are and you think about what we have achieved, we have been not only on plan for what we communicated but we are actually ahead of plan.”

AT&T said in a separate announcement that HBO Max now has 12.6 million activations, compared to 8.6 million at the end of September, with one metric, “the number of hours of engagement per week” jumping 36 percent over the past thirty days. 

Stankey also directly addressed the 2021 movie slate announcement.

“First of all, fundamentally one of the unfortunate effects of the pandemic is, there basically has been no theatrical exhibition business. And that’s painful for a lot of people,” the CEO said. “And yet, in our case, we still have a fair amount of content that was in the pipeline and being developed and we have everybody in the industry doing the same thing which is, in many instances, having an ability to actually take that product out to the consumer.”

Stankey, at the conference, did not address the company’s reported plans to sell its DirecTV division, although he did talk about pay TV more generally.

“The direct contribution or the marginal contribution of the Pay TV bundle has seen its best days,” he said. “And I would expect as we project going forward, just like I mentioned earlier, what’s happening now because that aggregated Pay TV content is available on so many different platforms, traditional distributors, virtual distributors, what’s happening is the margin at retail has been competed away or is being competed away. Now the people that are wholesaling the content and are still doing reasonably well, but it's been more pressure on the end-user retail distributor.” 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for the National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters