USA Today has a story on AT&T striking marketing agreements to foster faster adoptions of CallVantage with five of the most important cable companies in the USA. Only Cablevision, the metro New York conglomerate currently is sitting on the sidelines. The move by AT&T may be even more significant when one looks beyond the words, as it clearly shows execution of the vision of Dave Dorman, AT&T’s forward thinking Chairman and CEO in action.
AT&T, which already has the biggest network for IP communications in place, plus they are demonstrating with their current ad campaign that they clearly have the marketing clout to build the category. By striking these co-marketing agreements with the cable MSO’s, which appear to be non-exclusive, they can now further spread the proliferation of Voice over IP with that effort, and at the same time spur on greater acceptance of broadband Internet by consumers via cable, thus helping to shore up the cable companies efforts in the battle vs. DSL. Considering AT&T exited the home cable business in 2002 and recently announced it would no longer aggressively pursue new customers for its traditional local and long distance services, this move makes all those decisions seem very logical. AT&T clearly is saying they are no longer the same old phone company, but something much more.
In the USA cable companies dominate the current installed user base for high speed internet, and while DSL is hoping to catch up, customers with cable in most of the country pretty much can get broadband Internet if they want it. In the old days of cable ad sales, we used to call this “homes passed” which meant the consumers had the option to receive and subscribe.
What Dorman and the AT&T CallVantage team are doing is much akin to what the cable networks did to further help the MSO’s in the growth era of cable. That being to advertise their own offerings elsewhere and get people to sign up for cable service in order to get the content. In this case the content is the CallVantage service. That’s very smart and clearly shows market leadership.
While Vonage has in the past done similar deals with smaller cable companies, the AT&T marketing agreements with these five companies is likely the first of a series of moves that AT&T will make in this arena. By taking a page out of the Ted Turner TBS book of how to work with the cable companies, Dorman has shown how to work with the competition, by working in a manner of coopitition.
AT&T also announced today that they have opened up more markets, bringing them to 170, making them likely the most widely accessible VoIP player in the USA http://www.att.com/news/item/0,1847,13211,00.html as well as offering now free Calling to Canada and one of the industry’s first inside wire solutions. Is Mexico next?