Get ready for another huge streaming platform, America. HBO Max from AT&T’s WarnerMedia is scheduled to debut Wednesday, May 27th with over 10,000 of content encompassing the libraries of HBO, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, Crunchyroll, CNN, Looney Tunes, Rooster Teeth, TBS, TNT, truTV, and Turner Classic Movies.

HBO Max will replace HBO Now — the premium movie network’s subscription service for cord-cutters, and will remain priced at $14.99 a month. Those who currently subscribe to HBO through Charter Spectrum, AT&T TV (and TV Now), or DirecTV will get access to the HBO Max service at no additional cost.

WarnerMedia is positioning the service as a general interest streaming platform and super-sized HBO offering, sold as “Where HBO meets so much more.” It will combine legacy network TV content with original HBO movies and shows, and productions made especially for HBO Max.

“Our No. 1 goal is having extraordinary content for everyone in the family, and the HBO Max programming mix we are so excited to unveil on May 27th will bear that out,” said Bob Greenblatt, chairman of Warner Media Entertainment and Direct-To-Consumer. “Even in the midst of this unprecedented pandemic, the all-star teams behind every aspect of HBO Max will deliver a platform and a robust slate of content that is varied, of the highest quality, and second to none.”

HBO Max is likely to face challenges that its closest competitors — Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video do not. First, the service will launch with a premium price – $14.99 a month, which is more than double what Hulu charges and more than streaming leader Netflix, which suffered a growth slowdown after the last price increase brought its most popular plan to $12.99 a month. Second, the streaming market has become saturated with services that launched before HBO Max, which may potentially limit enthusiasm in these times of economic uncertainty. Disney+ launched with heavy discounting and comes free to a number of customers through cross-promotions with other companies. A subscription service asking for $15 a month at launch may prove a difficult sell, especially to those with no interest in HBO. Third, the HBO brand conveys an impression to would-be customers about the platform’s content. HBO has been criticized for its “male-centered” programming, replete with violence and sexual content. The brand itself may be a hard sell in conservative households with younger children, despite the fact it will feature a large roster of classic and new Looney Tunes cartoons, a Sesame Street original, and other family-friendly programming.

Subscribers will find content on the platform including:

Classic TV Shows: “Friends,” “The Big Bang Theory,” “South Park”

Movies: all Studio Ghibli films, films from Warner Bros., New Line and DC like “Joker,” “Suicide Squad,” “Wonder Woman,” “The Matrix,” “Casablanca” and “The Wizard of Oz.”

Originals: Comedy series “Love Life” starring Anna Kendrick, documentary “On the Record” about accusations of sexual harassment and rape against hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons; “Legendary,” an underground ballroom dance competition series; “Craftopia,” hosted by YouTube star LaurDIY; an all-new “Looney Tunes Cartoons” from Warner Bros. Animation; and Sesame Workshop’s “The Not Too Late Show with Elmo.”

Watch the trailer from HBO Max original “Love Life,” starting May 27. (1:57)

The merger of T-Mobile and Sprint would never have been approved by the Justice Department had Charles Ergen not promised to launch a new nationwide wireless competitor to protect competition. But now Ergen may be wavering over his commitment.

The founder of satellite TV company Dish Network had promised to spend nearly $10 billion to build a new 5G network capable of reaching 70 percent of the population by June 2023 as part of negotiations between T-Mobile, Sprint, and the federal government. But with the coronavirus pandemic shutting down the U.S. economy, the New York Post reports the company will have a difficult time finding the money to build that network.

“I think whatever rosy projections Charlie had are now very questionable,” said a source who expected to be part Dish’s lending group. “There is no financing to build a telecom network.”

Oddly, Ergen predicted just such a scenario in December when he testified to Dish’s ability to replace Sprint. In order to prove he was fit for the job, the 67-year-old media mogul showed off letters from three banks — Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley — saying they would gladly fund his expensive network construction.

“Where the markets are today — if we don’t have another 9-11, God forbid — the banks are confident,” Ergen told the packed courtroom.

That testimony helped convince Manhattan federal judge Victor Marrero to approve T-Mobile’s $26 billion acquisition of Sprint, despite calls by a group of attorneys general, including Letitia James of New York, to block the deal, which they said would reduce competition and increase prices for consumers.

Ergen’s commitment to build a new fourth national wireless carrier was crucial for T-Mobile and Sprint to win regulatory approval of their $26 billion merger, which will reduce the number of national wireless competitors to three. That merger secretly received help from the country’s chief antitrust enforcer, Makan Delrahim. The Trump-appointed regulator, who serves as the head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, exchanged numerous text messages between himself and top executives of Sprint, T-Mobile, and Dish to help salvage a merger deal under heavy criticism from Democrats and consumer advocates. Delrahim signaled his approval of the merger if Dish promised to buy Sprint’s prepaid wireless brand Boost and was offered access to T-Mobile’s wireless network to help launch Dish Wireless as a new competitor. But executives from Sprint and T-Mobile repeatedly quarreled over the details of the merger with Ergen, forcing Delrahim to intervene and bring the parties together to smooth things over.

Several consumer advocates and state attorneys general questioned the merger and Ergen’s commitment and capacity to serve as a new competitor. Ergen has warehoused wireless spectrum for years and has yet to meaningfully deploy it, deal critics contend. Additionally, Dish Wireless will be unlikely to achieve the scale and size of Sprint, the wireless carrier absorbed by the merger. That could mean it would be unable to deter anti-competitive behavior by the three larger companies — AT&T, Verizon, and the New T-Mobile. The most skeptical suggest Ergen has no intention of constructing a network for Dish Wireless. Instead, they contend he quietly intends to sell the wireless operation and potentially sweeten the deal by including Dish’s satellite TV business, its existing portfolio of unused wireless spectrum, or both.

If Ergen cannot meet the 2023 deadline, regulators could fine his company $2 billion and force it to relinquish the $12 billion worth of wireless spectrum Dish Network has been warehousing for years.

To succeed, Ergen will need Wall Street banks to cooperate and continue extending Dish Wireless credit. He will also need to find capable engineers ready to place 5G infrastructure on thousands of cell towers at the same time other wireless providers are building 5G networks of their own. None of this will be possible until the coronavirus crisis abates and the economy recovers. Despite this, some analysts are willing to still give Ergen the benefit of the doubt.

“Two months of severe market uncertainty doesn’t really alter my view of a company to execute on a three-year plan,” Lightshed Partners Analyst Walt Piecyk told The Post, saying it is too soon to question if Ergen will meet the deadline.

Ergen may also be able to convince regulators to approve a delay, pushing out the deadline. Assuming Ergen closes the deal to acquire Boost Mobile, which currently relies on Sprint’s 4G network to service its prepaid wireless customers, Boost will likely be rechristened Dish Wireless and serve as Ergen’s contribution to a competitive wireless industry until his own network gets off the ground.

Frontier Communications has revealed to investors what many probably realized long ago — the independent phone company chronically underinvested in network upgrades and repairs for years, giving customers an excuse to switch providers.

Remarkably, the phone company did not just underperform for its remaining voice and DSL internet customers. In a sprawling confidential “Presentation to Unsecured Bondholders” report produced by Frontier’s top executives, the company admits it was even unable to achieve significant growth in its fiber territories, where Frontier-acquired high-speed FiOS and U-verse fiber networks held out a promise to deliver urgently needed revenue.

Frontier’s bondholders were told the company’s ongoing losses and poor overall performance were unsustainable, despite years of executive “happy talk” about Frontier’s various rescue and upgrade plans. In sobering language, Frontier admitted its capital structure and efforts to deleverage the company’s massive debts were likely to cut the company off from future borrowing opportunities and deter future investment.

The presentation found multiple points of weakness in Frontier’s current business plan:

Voice landline service remains in perpetual decline. Like other companies, Frontier’s residential landline customers left first, but now business customers are also increasingly disconnecting traditional phone service.

About 51% of Frontier’s revenue comes from its residential customers. That number has been declining about 5% annually, year over year as customers leave. Frontier’s internet products are now crucial to the company’s ability to stay in business. Less than 30% of Frontier’s revenue comes from selling home phone lines. For Frontier to remain viable, the company must attract and keep internet customers. For the last several years, it has failed to do either.

Frontier customers are disconnecting the company’s low-speed DSL service in growing numbers, usually leaving for its biggest residential competitor: Charter Spectrum. Frontier remains saddled with a massive and rapidly deteriorating copper wire network. The company disclosed that 79% of its footprint is still served with copper-based DSL. Only 21% of Frontier’s service area is served by fiber optics, after more than a decade of promised upgrades. Frontier’s own numbers prove that where the company still relies on selling DSL, it is losing ground fast. Only its fiber service areas stand a chance. Just consider these numbers:

• Out of 11 million homes in Frontier’s DSL service area, only 1.5 million customers subscribe. That’s a market share of just 13 percent, and that number declines every quarter.
• Where Frontier customers can sign up for fiber to the home service, 1.2 million customers have done so, delivering Frontier a respectable 40 percent market share.

Frontier has been promising DSL speed upgrades for over a decade, but the company’s own numbers show a consistent failure to deliver speeds that can meet the FCC’s definition of “broadband,” currently 25 Mbps.

At least 30% of Frontier DSL customers receive between 0-12 Mbps download speed. Another 35% receive between 13-24 Mbps. Only 6% of Frontier customers get the “fast” DSL capable of exceeding 24 Mbps that is touted repeatedly by Frontier executives on quarterly conference calls.

Despite the obvious case for fiber to the home service, Frontier systematically “under-invested in fiber upgrades” in copper service areas at the same time consumers were upgrading broadband to acquire more download speed. Frontier’s report discloses that nearly 40% of consumers in its service area subscribe to internet plans offering 100 Mbps or faster service. Another 40% subscribe to plans offering 25-100 Mbps. In copper service areas, Frontier is speed-competitive in just 6% of its footprint. That leaves most speed-craving customers with only one path to faster speed: switching to another provider, typically the local cable company.

So why would a company like Frontier not immediately hit the upgrade button and start a massive copper retirement-fiber upgrade plan to keep the company in the black? In short, Frontier has survived chronic underinvestment because of a lack of broadband competition. Nearly two million Frontier customers have only one choice for internet access: Frontier. For another 11.3 million, there is only one other choice – a cable company that many detest. Frontier has enjoyed its broadband monopoly/duopoly for at least two decades. So long as its customers have fewer options, Frontier is under less pressure to invest in upgrades.

For years Frontier’s stock was primarily known for its generous dividend payouts to shareholders — money that could have been spent on network upgrades. But what hurt Frontier even more was an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy that acquired castoff landline customers from Verizon and AT&T in several states. In its most recent multi-billion dollar acquisition of Verizon customers in California, Texas, and Florida, Frontier did not achieve the desired financial results after alienating customers with persistent service and billing problems. The longer term legacy of these acquisitions is a huge amount of unpaid debt.

Frontier’s notorious customer service problems are now legendary. Frontier’s new CEO Bernie Han promises that customer service improvements are among his top four priorities. Improving the morale of employees that have been forced to disappoint customers on an ongoing basis is another.

Frontier executives are proposing to fix the company by deleveraging the company’s debt and restructuring it, freeing up capital that can be spent on long overdue network upgrades. Executives claim the first priority will be to scrap more of Frontier’s copper wire network in favor of fiber upgrades. That would be measurable progress for Frontier, which has traditionally relied on acquiring fiber networks from other companies instead of building their own.

But the company will also continue to benefit from a chronic lack of competition and Wall Street’s inherent dislike of large capital spending projects. The proposal does not come close to advocating the scrapping of all of Frontier’s copper service in favor of fiber. In fact, a rebooted Frontier would only incrementally spend $1.4 billion on fiber upgrades until 2024, $1.9 billion in all over the next decade. That would bring fiber to only three million additional Frontier customers, those the company is confident would bring the highest revenue returns. The remaining eight million copper customers would be stuck relying on Frontier’s existing DSL or potentially be sold off to another company.

Frontier seems more attracted to the prospect of introducing or upgrading service to approximately one million unserved or underserved rural customers where it can leverage broadband subsidy funding from the U.S. government. To quote from the presentation: Frontier plans to “invest in areas that are most appropriate and profitable and limit or cease investments in areas that are not.”

Another chronic problem for Frontier’s current business is its cable TV product, sold to fiber customers.

“High content/acquisition costs have made adding new customers to the Company’s video product no longer a profitable exercise,” the company presentation admits. If the company cannot raise prices on its video packages or successfully renegotiate expensive video contracts to a lower price, customers can expect a slimmed down video package, likely dispensing with regional sports networks and other high cost channels. Frontier may even eventually scrap its video packages altogether.

To successfully achieve its goals, Frontier is likely to put itself into Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization no later than April 14, 2020. The company’s earlier plans may have been impacted by the current economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic, so the exact date of a bankruptcy declaration is not yet known.

A Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization of Frontier Communications is imminent, as the company is planning to skip a crucial $320 million debt payment to bondholders on March 15, automatically triggering a 30-day grace period before creditors can demand full payment of Frontier’s debt.

Bloomberg News notes this decision comes as Frontier prepares to file for bankruptcy as early as March 16, with a plan that will reduce its owed debts and turn over control of the phone company to creditors. Frontier has more than $17.5 billion in debt, which is becoming unmanageable for a company that has lost customers month after month for years.

A Frontier bankruptcy would jolt the telecom industry because it would be the largest failure of a telecom company since 2002’s bankruptcy of Worldcom, which used to include MCI.

Sources told the news organization Frontier was holding discussions this week with prospective lenders willing to provide a “debtor-in-possession loan” to the company. That loan would be essential to finance a restructuring of the troubled phone company, backed by giving lenders control over Frontier’s operations.

Multiple groups of bondholders will also be involved in the discussions, including activist shareholder Elliott Management Corp., which most recently pressured AT&T to improve its business model by focusing on its core businesses.

News of Frontier’s plan to miss bond payments caused a dramatic drop in Frontier’s stock price today, which was trading as low as 29 cents a share.

Spectrum Mobile customers enrolled in an unlimited data plan will get free access to Verizon’s millimeter wave 5G network, if they own a device that supports 5G service.

Charter Communications extended its deal with Verizon Wireless, which currently supplies Spectrum Mobile with 4G LTE service, to include Verizon’s 5G service, now available in a few neighborhoods in these cities:

• Atlanta
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Grand Rapids
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• New York City
• Providence
• St. Paul
• Boise
• Cincinnati
• Denver
• Greensboro
• Indianapolis
• Memphis
• Omaha
• Salt Lake City
• Washington D.C.
• Boston
• Cleveland
• Des Moines
• Hampton Roads
• Kansas City
• Miami
• Panama City
• Sioux Falls
• Charlotte
• Columbus
• Detroit
• Hoboken
• Little Rock
• Minneapolis
• Phoenix
• Spokane

Customers on Spectrum’s pay-per-gigabyte plan can access Verizon 5G service by switching to Spectrum’s $45 unlimited plan. Otherwise, they will remain locked to Verizon’s 4G LTE network only. Spectrum Mobile is selling customers Samsung’s S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra 5G-capable phones with financing package prices ranging from $41-58 a month, and promises other 5G-capable devices will also be supported in the future.

At present, Verizon’s millimeter wave 5G service only works outdoors and is generally only available in very limited urban areas, often in business, shopping, or entertainment districts downtown. Charter is considering launching its own wireless network in the future utilizing CBRS frequencies, which can reach indoors and can travel over longer distances than millimeter wave technology. For now, Spectrum Mobile is dependent on Wi-Fi and Verizon Wireless’ nationwide network.