U-verse, renowned for its success in the traditional paid TV service and technology sector, represented the final major player in this market before a significant shift towards exclusive over-the-top (OTT) delivery emerged. AT&T, having developed an infrastructure primarily for traditional television broadcasting, faced the challenge of adapting to a new era of live, on-demand, and DVR content delivery from the cloud. This situation necessitated a strategic transformation in both their business operations and their approach to delivering entertainment to customers.

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Problem Statement

AT&T needed to quickly adapt to the evolving market, transitioning from traditional paid TV walled gardens to open internet distribution. While they had a highly successful and scalable walled-garden service with U-verse, their infrastructure, applications, and middleware were not equipped for this new direction. A comprehensive digital transformation was imperative, requiring a shift in mindset followed by a strategic overhaul of their execution strategy.

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Solution

Over the course of five years, I spearheaded a diverse team of more than 75 professionals, including engineers, designers, project managers, testers, and operations engineers. Our objective was to assist AT&T in developing a business model that would transition U-verse from a walled garden paid TV service to a versatile platform available on major consumer devices like game consoles, web browsers, mobiles, tablets, Roku, Apple TV, and more. The ultimate solution involved a series of integrations among key components of a live and on-demand service, encompassing the following aspects:

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We formed strategic partnerships with companies adept at acquiring live broadcast feeds, encoding them, and subsequently streaming these feeds onto the internet. To facilitate cloud DVR functionality, we collaborated with cloud storage providers. In a similar vein, we integrated Cisco's CMS for efficient management of on-demand content, programming, listing, and entitlements.

Our platform also necessitated comprehensive integration with various AT&T systems, encompassing user management, payment processing, subscription services, discounts, and connectivity with other accounts like mobile or internet services. We also incorporated services from third-party providers for advertising, analytics, and live network feeds.

Initially, this common platform was operated exclusively by my team within our data centers. However, to achieve greater scalability, especially for consumer-facing components like websites, recommendation engines, and other high-volume APIs, we progressively transitioned to using AWS and Azure cloud services.

AT&T played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the delivery of video entertainment to consumers. Following their acquisition of DirecTV, they embarked on an ambitious project to integrate this new technology with their existing platform and phase out much of U-verse. As a leader in this transformative space, I spearheaded the team responsible for implementing these significant changes.

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Challenges

Working on the U-verse online project was an incredibly enriching experience, largely due to the extensive collaboration between various teams at AT&T, other vendors, and the multitude of novel challenges we faced. It was a journey of industry transformation, and there was a shared sense of being part of something groundbreaking.

One of our key tasks involved pioneering solutions for issues that hadn't been addressed before, such as authenticating paid TV subscribers on external applications like HBO Max. This allowed them to enjoy their favorite movies and shows beyond the U-verse platform. We also navigated uncharted legal territories around content licensing, debating whether Cloud DVR constituted actual storage of recordings or merely pointers to on-demand video files. This was crucial, as previous contracts were based on hardware set-top boxes in consumers' homes.

I thoroughly relished the opportunity to work in such a dynamic, collaborative setting, not just transforming AT&T as a business but also making significant strides in revolutionizing the entire industry.

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