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Mobile entertainment service under development at AT&T

According to the telecom company’s CEO, Randall Stephenson, it will soon be taking this big step.

Telco giant, AT&T currently has a mobile entertainment service in the works, according to its CEO and chairperson, Randall Stephenson, who recently spoke on the subject at an investor conference.

Stephenson discussed the company’s intentions to launch a service to compete with Go90 from Verizon.

The CEO also stated that AT&T plans to use this new mobile entertainment service as a part of an aggressive effort to provide an OTT content bundle for people who are not satellite television subscribers and who have either a single home television or who prefer to view their entertainment media over mobile. He pointed out that there are currently an estimated 30 million homes in the country that don’t subscribe to pay television services.

Through mobile entertainment services, AT&T is “very interested” in reaching more cost-conscious consumers.

Mobile Enteratinment - at&tStephenson also said that the company would soon be discussing this mobile media service in much more detail. That said, it was not at all made clear whether or not the service would be made available in the very near future or if consumers would need to wait for some time before they would be able to take advantage of this new choice.

Aside from the exclusively mobile technology side of the spectrum, Stephenson said that the company would soon be making an announcement with regards to premium content package. That announcement is expected to be made in January. What is expected is what the CEO called “mobile stacked content together with a really robust wireless asset.”

These announcements were made by the CEO while he spoke at the 43rd Annual Global Media and Communications Conference, which took place in New York. Though analysts were expecting him to offer more details for analysts following the DirecTV acquisition, that wasn’t the case.

Instead, he focused most of his attention on discussing the two primary ways in which content would now be delivered and the fact that they are “buying a big bundle of content” and that they “are also streaming the content to a mobile device.”

A number of Facebook apps dumped by the social network

At the same time, the top social media platform has gone ahead and shut down Creative Labs.

The initiative that was behind a range of the most experimental Facebook apps published by the social network – as well as a number of the applications it put out over the last year – have all been shut down and are no longer available for download.

Some of the mobile apps no longer available include Riff, Rooms and Slingshot, which were essentially failures.

Each of those Facebook apps were unpopular and were considered to have missed the mark in terms of what mobile device users actually want. According to the social network, it still intends to encourage experimentation. However, that will not be through Creative Labs, a type of initiative somewhat like a startup, which was quietly closed down. As of December 7, the Riff, Rooms and Slingshot apps were taken down from the app stores where they had previously been available. Moreover, the webpage for Creative Labs has also been taken down.

According to a spokesperson, the Facebook apps hadn’t received any updates in quite some time.

Facebook AppsThe spokeswoman explained that “Since their launches, we’ve incorporated elements of Slingshot, Riff and Rooms into the Facebook for iOS and Android apps.”

The social network is known for its inclination to continually “move fast and break things.” This time, it determined that some of the efforts it had made under that mantra hadn’t worked out, so it was bringing them to an end. This could potentially mark an important milestone in the development of applications under the Facebook brand, as the company turns its attention on other creative avenues.

For instance, it is still looking toward artificial intelligence (AI) technology, as well as drones that would be able to bring internet connections to highly remote parts of the world, in addition to virtual reality (VR) goggles. While the company had been continually adding new Facebook apps to offer new components of the desktop version of its service as well as to compete with other popular application offerings, it has been gradually turning toward boosting the features of its core platform, including the 360 degree videos and live streaming.