DirecTV: The Black Sunday Smart Card Kill and AT&T's $67 Billion Gamble

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DirecTV traces back to 1985, when the Howard Hughes Medical Institute sold Hughes Aircraft to General Motors for $5.1 billion, creating Hughes Electronics. Hughes teamed with Stanley E. Hubbard's United States Satellite Broadcasting and with Thomson Consumer Electronics, and in 1994 DirecTV launched with 175 digital channels, an interactive program guide and an 18-inch dish replacing backyard C-band receivers. Federal rules required 4 percent of capacity for noncommercial channels such as C-SPAN and NASA TV. DirecTV bought USSB in 1998 for over $1 billion and PrimeStar in 1999 for nearly $2 billion.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation took a 34 percent stake in 2003 for $6.6 billion under FCC arbitration conditions, then traded it to Liberty Media in 2008 in a deal valued at $11 billion. AT&T bought DirecTV for $67.1 billion in 2015, sold 30 percent to private equity firm TPG in 2021, and sold the remaining 70 percent to TPG in 2024 and 2025 for a little over $7 billion. A 2024 attempt to merge with Dish Network collapsed when Dish bondholders objected. Meanwhile engineers moved HD to Ka-band, added a five-LNB Slimline dish, rolled out the Genie whole-home DVR in 2012 and offered 4K in 2014.

• Weeks of innocent-looking updates assembled hidden code that, the week before the 2001 Super Bowl, fried 98 percent of hacked access cards and wrote GAME OVER into their first eight bytes; pirates called it Black Sunday.
• In 2012 Viacom demanded a 30 percent rate increase, and Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central went dark for DirecTV customers.
• The FTC fined DirecTV $5.3 million in 2005 for telemarketing violations and sued in 2015 over deceptive advertising.
• After Comcast sued over an Alex Trebek ad calling NFL Sunday Ticket free, DirecTV changed the wording to at no extra charge.
• DirecTV for Business became the commercial provider for Amazon's Thursday Night Football and Apple's MLS Season Pass in bars.