Last month, internal documents leaked hinting that AT&T would be dropping the DirecTV name for their upcoming streaming version of DirecTV. Today, as part of their second-quarter results, that saw a loss of nearly a million video customers, the company shared that the service will indeed be called AT&T TV and begin trials in the third quarter. According to reports, the box is expected to begin testing in August with a full rollout by the fourth quarter.
The new streaming service will use a custom Android TV “thin client” which won’t require customers to install a satellite dish to watch the same channels as on DirecTV.
In June, John Donovan, AT&T Communications CEO spoke about the company’s upcoming streaming version of the DirecTV service. He feels that “it radically reshapes what your concept of television is.” Donovan continued, “We think we’re going to be really disruptive in the market on features and capability, but we need to evolve our product — and that’s the way we want to do it.”
He said there is a big addressable market of customers that want DIRECTV, but due to line of sight, couldn’t in the past. “We can now call them back up and say, we now have a great opportunity for you.” The streaming box will be familiar to DIRECTV NOW customers, as it is identical to the Android TV box called Osprey that many users have received to test.