Eric Ravenscraft
AT&T is launching a new online TV service for $15/month, undercutting the cheapest offering from Sling. If you have an AT&T phone, you can sign up for it next week with new unlimited plans.
AT&T isn’t wasting time with its newly acquired Time-Warner assets. The new TV service, creatively called WatchTV, comes with a basic 31 channels, with 6 more coming from Viacom at a later date. Many of the included channels are Time-Warner properties, including Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies, CNN, and TBS. When it launches for everyone, users will be able to sign up for this package for $15/month, which is a significant savings over comparable packages from competing companies. Sling’s cheapest offering, for example, starts at $20/month.
Parallel to this announcement, AT&T is also launching new unlimited plans. Since “unlimited” doesn’t really mean anything anymore, there are multiple tiers of these new unlimited plans, both of which roll out next week:
- Unlimited &More will give users unlimited data for $70/month, but limit video streaming to 480p. It also doesn’t include any hotspot tethering data.
- Unlimited &More Premium costs $80/month and includes unlimited data while unlocking up to 1080p streaming, and up to 15GB of hotspot tethering data.
If you sign up for either of the new unlimited plans, you have the option of getting the WatchTV service as an add-on. In the future, WatchTV will be available as a standalone service, but if you want in now, you’ll need to be an AT&T mobile subscriber.
If you don’t care about WatchTV, the new plans also come with a $15 credit towards DirecTV satellite service. It’s clear that AT&T wants to start leveraging its mobile business to direct customers to its various television services as best it can. In the past, you might’ve gotten a home phone and cable package bundled together. Now, AT&T wants to bundle your cell phone and streaming or satellite TV service together.
