T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer John Legere didn’t miss the opportunity provided by the latest “Un-Carrier Next” conference to once again openly mock the rest of the wireless industry, having paid special attention to AT&T while speaking from Charleston, South Carolina, earlier today. The event organized for the launch of T-Mobile’s Team of Experts initiative also saw the industry veteran compare DirecTV Now service with Slow Cooker Sunday, a weekly cooking show he’s been streaming for the last two and a half years, primarily with the goal of pitching T-Mobile’s service in an unconventional manner.
With the latest iteration of the show attracting 4.2 million viewers on Facebook Live and DirecTV Now’s latest subscriber report estimating some 1.8 million users are with the service, Mr. Legere concluded AT&T’s video streaming platform is not delivering the growth T-Mobile’s rival hoped for. “[It’s] just a bad use of my weekend time,” said the executive in regards to the two viewership figures being compared. The 60-year-old also pulled up an image of an AT&T-themed Death Star during the event, remarking how the illustration “never gets old” and predicting that DirecTV Now will hardly see faster growth even as AT&T is “now throwing Apple TVs at people.” The full footage of the 75-minute event can be seen below.
The focus of the newest Un-Carrier Next conference was T-Mobile’s vow to solve the issue of the “soul-crushing” customer service segment and its reliance on interactive voice response (IVR) robots. The company’s expert teams are meant to address that problem by being individually dedicated to servicing particular areas and allowing customers to schedule calls or describe their problems in advance. As part of the same event, T-Mobile also announced an offer of free Pandora Plus subscriptions and Live Nation concert perks but hasn’t mentioned anything regarding its ambitions to launch an Internet TV service by the end of the year, something it was widely expected to do today. The service in question should still be introduced in the coming months, powered by Layer3 TV which T-Mobile acquired in early 2018.