AT&T chairman and CEO explains "the modern media company"

For the 11th year, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson sat down with Goldman Sachs for its Communacopia Conference and Talks with GS series on Sept. 17, 2019. During his time on stage, he discussed AT&T’s strategy as a modern media company, recent leadership changes, what 5G really means, and much more. Watch excerpts from his remarks in the videos below. Or, to read the interview transcript, click here.

Industry Trends and AT&T’s Modern Media Company Strategy

“We think a company that can put together premium media content creation and production with networks would have a significant strategic advantage.”

“… the content creation business is changing. And it’s not changing by a little. It’s changing rather radically.”

AT&T Chief Operating Officer John Stankey

"2020 is go-to-market. Take HBO Max, drive through your distribution channels, take the Turner inventory, drive into the Xandr technology platform. So, as we thought about who is going to run this play for the next couple of years, it was – it was a very short list. And John Stankey quickly rose to the top."

FirstNet First Responder Communications Network and AT&T’s Wireless Strategy

"What do you have to do to deploy 5G? You have to go climb every cell tower in the country and put up 5G antennas and the hardware associated with it. Well, guess what? By virtue of FirstNet, spectrum aggregation, 5G, we're climbing these cell towers one time and accomplishing three purposes. So, we've been doing this, and we literally, over the course of about three years, are increasing the entire nationwide capacity of the AT&T wireless network by 50%."

Why 5G is More Than Just Faster Wireless Speeds

“It’s more than faster protocol. It is faster, and it’s very low latency, meaning that the timeframe between initiating a command and actually executing it being visible to a consumer, actually executing a command if you’re in a manufacturing floor, those are almost real-time. We’re talking real-time networking … this isn’t just marginally better … the connectivity goes to a different level.”

AT&T’s 5G Plans

“We feel really good about where we are…we’ve been very aggressive.”

“By midyear next year, we’ll have a nationwide footprint of 5G, and I’m excited about it.”