DirecTV is one of the most recognizable U.S. brands. Its mounted satellite dishes, like weather vanes jutting out from a rooftop, remain ubiquitous on many an American home, a sign that quality programming—maybe even NFL Sunday Ticket, which DirecTV held the exclusive U.S. rights to for almost a decade— entertained those inside. It’s a little curious, then, that for a company so well-known, one of its latest national ad campaigns, which promotes DirecTV as available satellite-free, features pigeons voiced by two less familiar actors: Steve Buscemi and Henry Winkler. Brad Pitt and George Clooney they may not be, but in the ever-more- crowded and competitive streaming space, hiring Hollywood talent has its benefits. It can only get you so far.
The recognition of DirecTV, whose inception has a tenuous link to Howard Hughes, is unquestioned. It’s a brand that is as much at home in homes as it is in commercial spaces: hotels, restaurants, bars, retail shops and many other venues, even prisons, with their captive audiences. The responsibility for spreading the B2B DirecTV gospel is with Doug Eichler, SVP of DirecTV for Business, who, prior to his now 30 years with the company, was a social worker. That changed in 1995 when he joined what was then a startup, working in the call center before bouncing around to other departments. He remembers it as great training. “You had to resolve customer issues as the company grew,” he said.
Now, his customers are anything from a strip-mall nail salon to the 7,000-plus-room Venetian Las Vegas. Every roughneck on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico is watching DirecTV and when Air Force One is in flight, it’s how the president stays abreast of the news—or catches a ballgame. And while YouTube TV is now the exclusive home of NFL Sunday Ticket for residential, the package is still distributed in commercial venues through DirecTV.
IN MY ROOM
Hotel entertainment has come a long way from the days of roadside Day-Glo signage promising “Color TV” or, if luckier, “Free HBO.” Detritus from the past now, but, back in the 1960s and 1970s, hotels and motels were at the vanguard of TV technology. Eichler likes to tell of his grandparents’ road trips through Michigan and seeking out accommodations boasting such amenities. “Hotels are such a great case study of how technology has evolved,” Eichler said.
In today’s hyperkinetic technology menagerie, TV is taken for granted; if it’s even called that anymore with the panoply of apps, streaming options and devices and ability to watch what you want, when you want, commercials be damned.
What is clear, is that the moment a hotel guest walks into his or her room, the focal point remains the TV, wall-mounted or stationary, and what it can do once its flipped on. Eichler calls it “turning on the glass.” And though guests know they are in a hotel, as it relates to their entertainment, they want it to feel like home. Eichler uses his sister’s family as an example. As he related it, when they travel, his sister wants to watch Real Housewives, her husband live sports, while the kids are glued to their iPads. One room, two beds, one TV, multiple portable devices. “Customers are looking for an at-home-like experience and something that’s seamless,” he said, “where each does what they want to. Hoteliers have started to take it in that direction when you see the strides that have been made by some of the brands to bring together streaming and live TV content. We’re pulling those solutions together.”
RELATIONSHIP BUILDING
The distinctive DirecTV satellite dishes endure but streaming, sans hardware, is undeniably the future. Many still prefer satellite delivery, especially businesses, because the WiFi isn’t taxed. Next year, DirecTV will make available a streaming option to commercial businesses, including hotels, something that up to now has been unavailable. “Our business customers will have the option to stream it or beam it,” Eichler said.
Today, DirecTV for Business offers commercial partners the Advanced Entertainment Platform (AEP), which integrates live TV, streaming apps and guest subscription access, giving hotel guests the similar convenience and choice they have at home. It was updated in summer 2024.
Like any business, big or small, the rapport between seller and buyer carries weight. Without a strong bond and strong trust, there is no kinship. In the hotel business—a business built on relationships—hotel owners depend on vendors to deliver not only value, but the confidence that the underlying product works the way it’s intended.
Eichler in his earlier years with DirecTV fondly remembers the power of connection. In one instance, he met someone in the hotel space that he referred to as a “grizzled veteran,” some four decades with a brand. He greeted Eichler pleasantly, sat him down, and told him that he’d see him again in six months. “I’ll take another meeting after that if you’re still around, then we’ll maybe buy something from you, because I buy from people that I know and I’ve worked with for years,” Eichler recalled the man saying. The man was true to his word. He didn’t buy a single thing from DirecTV for another year. “Relationships are everything,” Eichler said.
The example was a teachable moment. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we had to get in and meet with hoteliers,” Eichler said. In those earlier years, Eichler and his team would ask hoteliers what they were doing right and what they could improve on. One woman half-joked: “Well, you cash our checks very well.”
Twice a year, DirecTV meets with its hotel advisory board, mostly comprised of hotel brands, to showcase its products and elicit feedback on how to improve. In its very first meeting, DirecTV presented a product road map. The consensus was clear: “We’re not buying it,” the board said. It was the exact type of constructive feedback DirecTV wanted. Eichler said they completely threw out the road map and started anew, developing it in conjunction with the hoteliers. “Everyone realizes we’re doing things to benefit the industry together,” he said.
DirecTV doesn’t share the actual number of hotels it works with but has several brand-level agreements in place with the likes of Hilton, Marriott International, Hyatt Hotels, BWH Hotels and other national chains, along with Aimbridge, the largest third- party management company in the world. In October, it entered into a multi-year agreement with the AHLA as a Gold Partner.
If there’s an ownership group involved, DirecTV also partners with them. And while these above-property master services agreements, which act like umbrella arrangements with the brands so that properties receive certain terms and conditions, are in place, DirecTV also has agreements in place with each individual property: At the end of the day, the bill needs to be paid.
Eichler acknowledges consumer competition from the likes of YouTube TV and other streaming platforms, but those are reserved for home- use only, not commercial. The one exception is Dish Network, long a competitor to DirecTV in the hotel space. That all appeared to change at the end of September when it was announced that DirecTV and EchoStar had entered into a definitive agreement under which DirecTV would acquire EchoStar’s video distribution business, including Dish TV and Sling TV, through a debt exchange transaction. In a statement at the time, DirecTV CEO Bill Morrow said the combination would work to help realize the future of TV, “which is to aggregate, curate and distribute content tailored to customers’ interests and to be better positioned to realize operating efficiencies…”
Just shy of two months later, the merger was scrapped, DirecTV walking away after Dish could not secure approval from its bondholders representing around $10.7 billion of debt in Dish and its DBS subsidiary. For the deal to have gone through, the bondholders had to agree to exchange their debt for new debt at a discounted rate, taking a haircut of more than $1.5 billion. “We have terminated the transaction because the proposed exchange terms were necessary to protect DirecTV’s balance sheet and our operational flexibility,” Morrow said.
No matter: DirecTV remains a dominant force in media and entertainment. But Eichler understands that it isn’t immune to competition, especially with the continued disaggregation of video. “It’s getting fiercer. The media landscape has completely changed,” he said.
TODAY, TOMORROW
DirecTV, for now, holds onto a singular position since most streaming providers are unique only to the residential market and not for commercial use. “A business can’t buy that and show it in their establishment,” Eichler said. Instead, DirecTV’s AEP allows hotels and guests to access the myriad apps that exist, while also accessing live TV and on-demand titles. For example, the platform contains the entire Showtime library.
The hotel industry is often razzed for its glacial embrace of new technology, an almost repudiation of the earlier years of color TV and air conditioning promises. As Eichler put it: “One of the premier television experiences in the country was in a hotel and then by the 1990s it became one of the worst.” There was no interactive program guide and unless you traveled with a TV Guide, you were out of luck. It was channel up, channel down; no clue what was going to come next. More than 30 years later, it’s progressed. “Hoteliers and vendors have made strides in improving the experience,” Eichler said.
Now, artificial intelligence could help redefine it once again. DirecTV, on both the residential and commercial side, has scores of engineers— Eichler calls them rocket scientists—that are dedicated to solving customer problems and testing new technologies. AI, he said, is changing everything. “It can be the best thing ever; it can also be a bit of a distraction.”
DirecTV is embracing AI, but Eichler believes it remains secondary to problem solving for guests and businesses first. “We’re trying to use it strategically to fill a need,” he said. “You start with the problem statement and then you create an AI solution around it.” Like many companies, hotels included, a lot of AI isn’t yet directly embedded in the product but used to streamline operations and resolve frustrations, especially in call centers. “We still get thousands of phone calls,” Eichler said.
In the entertainment space, AI can help identify hardware or software issues. “It can detect that the TV isn’t working quite right. Is it an HDMI connection problem or a network?” Eichler said. “If you do it right, it can recommend corrective action before a guest calls the front desk.”
The hotel industry moves on the vendors it works with. All the technology and all the programming aren’t worth a lick without partnership. It’s at the center of Eichler’s ethos: “You want to partner with someone you think is going to be there for you,” he said, offering the COVID pandemic as an example. Hotels, restaurants, bars, which make up two-thirds of DirecTV’s commercial business, were decimated, literally going dry. This is where true partnership showed its worth. DirecTV worked with its clients, foregoing what Eichler called “a lot of revenue.” For more than a year, it allowed customers to suspend their service or adjust billing dependent on occupancy.
“It’s as much about the kind of company you’re working with as it is the kind of services you offer,” Eichler said. “Our approach was one that cost us some money, but it created goodwill that’s yielded benefits to this day.”