AT&T-Time Warner deal means even more social media spoilers
Brace yourselves: Countless clips are coming to your newsfeeds with a new DirectTV service that makes it easier to share content.
Get ready to see "Game of Thrones" dominate your Facebook and Twitter feeds even more.
AT&T's potential megadeal with Time Warner means tapping into the television giant's massive content library of hits for social media.
That library includes "Game of Thrones," CNN and professional sports like the MLB and NBA -- all which already dominate the feeds across social media. "Game of Thrones," the HBO series based on George R.R. Martin's novels, already generates hundreds of thousands of tweets, surging to the top trending topics every episode.
After pushing a deal to purchase Time Warner for $85.4 billion on Saturday, AT&T now hopes to push the media company's beloved viral content on its own DirecTV Now platform with a big focus on social media.
The live-streaming service, set to launch in November, is expected to let users take snippets of Time Warner-owned content and share them on social media, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson told analysts on Monday.
"We know our customers are really dependent on that," Stephenson said.
Time Warner has long been focused on mobile content and on-demand videos, the company's CEO Jeff Bewkes said during the call, pointing to HBO Go as an example.
For years, CNN had been using social media as a platform to post snippets of its segments. In 2012, the news network partnered with SnappyTV to give users the chance to take clips and share their favorite moments in real time during a debate between Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama.
Stephenson envisions that same sort of sharing, but for all of Time Warner's content. Users, for example, would be able to quickly share across social media the game-winning shot from an NBA game or the moment their favorite "Game of Thrones" character dies.
The idea is similar to Verizon's Go90, a free mobile TV service that branded itself as "social entertainment" when it was launched. The service also allows users to clip segments of videos, which can be shared on Facebook and Twitter or via email and text message.
Go90 hasn't been as much of a success as Verizon hoped it would be, quickly falling out of the top app listings since it was launched.
Bewkes isn't concerned with the mobile platform falling flat on its face. He called AT&T the "best at mobile delivery," and predicted the telecommunications giant would be able to smoothly deliver all of Time Warner's shows on mobile platforms.
With Time Warner's vast cast of beloved characters -- from Superman to Harry Potter -- Stephenson believes customers will flock to DirecTV Now, spreading the word on social media.