Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, recently announced that the company will be working to replace their satellite TV (DirecTV) with an OTT offering over the web. The company plans to launch the first beta trials by the end of this year. The ultimate goal will be for the online offering to eventually replace the satellite offering.

He didn’t provide any specific details of the planned offering other than comparing it to the current DirecTV Now offering that carries about 100 channels and is a direct competitor to landline cable TV.

Obviously the company has a lot of details to work out. DirecTV currently has over 20 million customers and along with Comcast is the only other cable provider that added customers over the last year ending in the second quarter. The biggest online live broadcast offering today is Dish Network’s Sling TV with around 2 million customers. AT&T faces numerous technical challenges if they want to transfer their huge customer base onto the web.

People always speculate why AT&T bought DirecTV and perhaps now we finally have the answer. The product will be marketed nationwide, not just in the AT&T footprint. The big advantage for AT&T is that they are not saddled with FCC rules that create the large cable bundles of 200 channels, and so perhaps they have found a way to make online bundles of cable channels profitable again. It seems that there are probably more profits in a 100-channel line-up than in traditional cable offerings. The same may not be true for skinny bundles and there is a lot of speculation that low-price OTT offerings like Sling TV at $20 don’t make any money.

This move would enable AT&T to leap forward and to easily keep up with the latest video technology. Almost all legacy video is using dated technology like the satellite DBS, the QAM on cable networks and even AT&T’s own first-generation IPTV headends. With an online product the company can get completely out of the settop box and the installation business for TV. They can also easily keep up with new formats and standards, such as the ability to immediately be able to offer 4K video everywhere. Going online makes it a lot easier to meet future customer demands as the industry continues to change rapidly.

But this has to be scary news for rural America. AT&T and Verizon have both made it clear they would like to tear down legacy copper networks, which will make it hard or impossible for some parts of rural America to make voice calls. If copper wires disappear then Cable TV over satellite is the only other modern telecom product available in a lot of rural America. If it’s phased out then much of rural America falls off the telecom map entirely.

While we have no idea if Dish Networks has similar plans, but the fact that they are migrating customers to Sling TV indicates that they might. This could turn ugly for rural America.

Obviously a quality OTT video product requires a quality broadband connection – something that is not available in millions of rural homes. It’s not hard to envision a future in which a home without good broadband might be isolated from the outside world.

It’s clear that the big companies like AT&T are focused only on bottom-line, and perhaps they should be. But one of the primary benefits of having incumbent regulated providers was that everybody in the country was offered the same choice of products. But unfortunately, the never-ending growth of broadband demand has broken the old legacy system. It was one thing to make sure that everybody was connected to the low-bandwidth voice network, but it’s something altogether different to make sure that rural America gets the same broadband as everybody else.

I can remember a time when I was a kid that a lot of rural homes didn’t have cable TV. Some rural homes were lucky enough to get a few TV stations over the air if they had a tall antenna. But many homes had no TV options due to the happenstance of their location. Satellite TV came along and fixed this issue and one expects when visiting a farm today to see a satellite dish in the yard or on the roof. This might become soon another of those quaint memories that are a thing of the past. But in doing so it will add to the political pressure to find a workable rural broadband solution.