AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson today announced AT&T would offer a slim-sized version of DirecTV Now offering a significant number of cable networks and live local television stations, but without expensive sports programming.

The new service, AT&T Watch, will sell for $15/month and is expected to arrive sometime this May.

The new option is expected to compete head to head with Dish Network-owned Sling TV.

CenturyLink’s Prism TV

CenturyLink has stopped expanding its cable TV alternative Prism TV, and will no longer promote the service to its customers.

“Due to emerging market trends in video content and delivery, we do not plan to expand our Prism TV service offering,” CenturyLink spokesperson Francie Dudrey told Fierce Cable, in a statement delivered at the NAB Show yesterday. “We will continue to provide service and support to our current Prism TV subscribers and make the service available to qualified customers who request it in the markets where we currently offer Prism TV.”

As Stop the Cap! reported last month, CenturyLink is planning to pull back on residential broadband upgrades and services it was expecting to sell on its improved internet platform after the company announced senior management changes. One key sign CenturyLink was moving away from Prism TV was the sudden retirement of Duane Ring on March 30. Ring, a 34-year veteran at CenturyLink had been recently promoted to help oversee CenturyLink’s residential broadband upgrades and was instrumental to the launch of Prism TV in 2005.

Wall Street and activist shareholders had pushed CenturyLink hard to replace long time CEO Glen Post III, who had recently turned bullish on costly residential broadband upgrades. Post’s replacement, former Level 3 CEO Jeff Storey, wants to refocus CenturyLink on its more profitable commercial customers.

Ironically, Level 3 was acquired by CenturyLink in 2016. Now some of Level 3’s top executives will firmly control CenturyLink itself. Shareholder activists were pleased with CenturyLink’s new direction under Storey’s leadership, arguing CenturyLink shouldn’t be devoting significant resources or funding to its legacy phone and copper broadband businesses. CenturyLink will now move away from home broadband services and towards commercial and enterprise broadband, metro ethernet, and cloud/backup services. About two-thirds of CenturyLink customers are commercial enterprises.

CenturyLink will now promote DirecTV to its residential customers instead of Prism TV.

Longer term, a growing number of analysts suspect CenturyLink’s new management will want to sell off some or all of CenturyLink’s residential customers to refocus the business entirely on its commercial customers. The company refused to discuss that issue at this time. CenturyLink may find a difficult market for would-be buyers. Frontier Communications, a regular buyer of wireline assets, is itself mired in debt and financial difficulties.

Investors continue to be skeptical of the merits of costly network upgrades for the nation’s copper wire phone networks. In areas where fiber-enabled phone companies compete directly with cable, price wars can develop, reducing profits and the incentive to invest.

CenturyLink Stream, the phone company’s planned nationwide alternative to cable television, will shut down its streamed package of nearly 50 channels on March 31.

The phone company had contemplated using CenturyLink Stream to compliment its package of phone and broadband service to budget-conscious customers. But Multichannel News reports subscribers were notified this week CenturyLink was pulling the plug on the service and its companion $89.99 Android TV set-top box that interfaced between a customer’s broadband connection and their television.

“Thank you to all who have streamed with us and provided feedback,” the company noted on its website. As compensation, customers are getting free on-demand rentals of movies on the service until it shuts down.

CenturyLink Stream’s “Ultimate” package sold for $45 per month, with a $5 discount if a CenturyLink customer bundled the company’s broadband service. It included a 50-hour cloud DVR service and access in some markets to local stations and regional sports channels.

CenturyLink’s Prism TV continues.

The company has stayed silent on exactly why it is pulling the plug on the service, which had been beta testing over the past year. Independent telephone companies beyond AT&T and Verizon have struggled to deliver credible triple play packages of fast broadband, phone service, and a lineup of cable television programming. Frontier Communications has avoided expanding its FiOS TV package outside of service areas acquired from AT&T and Verizon. Windstream recently announced a deal with AT&T to resell its DirecTV and DirecTV Now video packages, which could spell trouble for Windstream’s Kinetic TV platform, which has only slowly expanded since being announced in 2015.

Analysts say it is increasingly difficult for smaller companies to profitably sell video programming because of generous volume discounts on wholesale rates offered to the country’s biggest satellite TV, cable, and telco TV providers. AT&T itself acquired DirecTV to get better video pricing for its U-verse TV customers. Smaller phone companies cannot afford similar acquisitions. Instead, some companies have partnered with third-party providers already in the video business.

The National Cable TV Cooperative, which offers group pricing to small and medium-sized independent cable companies and municipal providers, have already announced partnerships with sports-oriented fuboTV and PlayStation Vue, which both sell packages of cable TV programming streamed over the internet.

That is the likely direction CenturyLink will head in, if it continues its interest in selling a television package.

“[W]e are open to looking at other options,” Glen Post, CenturyLink’s CEO, said last August on the company’s Q2 earnings call, noted Multichannel News. “Matter of fact, we continually talk with some of these other providers, look at the best ways we can bring that service and also other ways in working with them to reduce our content cost…It does not have to be our product.”

AT&T’s promised more jobs as a result of a large corporate tax cut, but is now reneging on the deal.

More than 2,000 AT&T employees will be given a one-time bonus of $1,000 as a consequence of the passage of the Republican tax cut legislation signed into law late last week by President Donald Trump and then will see their jobs terminated as AT&T begins sweeping job cuts across several of its divisions.

In the midwest, at least 600 employees working to maintain AT&T’s wireline network have been notified their jobs will be lost by early 2018. Additional layoffs include more than 700 DirecTV home installers whose jobs will be eliminated or outsourced to third-party contractors, 215 “high skilled technicians in nine southern states” whose jobs will not be replaced, and almost 700 workers in Texas and Missouri will see their jobs disappear beginning in February.

“Technology improvements are driving higher efficiencies, and there are some areas where demand for our legacy services continues to decline, and we’re adjusting our workforce in some of those areas as we continue to align our workforce with the changing needs of the business,” AT&T explained in a statement. “Many of the affected employees have a job offer guarantee that ensures they’ll be offered another job with the company, and we’ll work to find other jobs for as many of them as possible.”

Workers report AT&T’s promises do not tell the whole story. Most offered replacement jobs will have to move to other states and accept compensation reductions and a loss of seniority. If those workers were to need professional help, they can put their utmost trust on a workers comp lawyer.

“How can you lay people off and then give them $1,000 and say that there’s going to be more jobs available? I wish someone could tell me how that’s possible because I have to explain that to my members, and right now at this time of year, this is a difficult pill to swallow,” Joseph Blanco, president of Local 6360 Communication Workers of America Union in Kansas City, told Fox 4 on Thursday.

Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, joined with Republicans in a press statement that claimed the new tax bill would improve the U.S. economy and the company’s standing.

In the spring of 2017, Stephenson promised an additional 7,000 jobs for every $1 billion in investment:

“The arithmetic for us is simple: For every billion dollars of additional investment we make is 7,000 additional jobs we have to put on to put that capital into the ground or on cell towers and so forth,” he said, adding that those jobs would likely be “hard hat” jobs that pay well.

“Congress, working closely with the president, took a monumental step to bring taxes paid by U.S. businesses in line with the rest of the industrialized world. This tax reform will drive economic growth and create good-paying jobs,” Stephenson said, according to CNBC. Except those “good-paying jobs” likely won’t be with AT&T. In statements to investors, Stephenson reiterated his plans for sweeping job cuts in the form of “cost savings.”

Last year, senior executives at AT&T told The New York Times that “shrinking the [company’s] workforce by 30 percent is not out of the question.”