On Monday, AT&T announced a $43 billion deal to merge its content unit, WarnerMedia with rival Discovery. The merger, still pending regulators’ approval, signals a change in AT&T’s years-long strategy of combining its communications networks with content production and distribution. Aija Leiponen, professor at the SC Johnson College of Business and an expert in telecom industries, says that AT&T’s reversal validates what observers have been witnessing in recent years: that telecom ownership of content business is not a value added.
