US telco AT&T has moved to rebrand Time Warner as WarnerMedia following its $85.4bn (€72.37bn) takeover of the media company.
AT&T officially takes control of WarnerMedia this week after a US federal judge last week approved the deal, rejecting an appeal by the Department of Justice against the proposed merger.
John Stankey, a long-time senior AT&T executive, has been installed as the new chief executive of WarnerMedia, with John Martin, who had led Turner, the company’s cable-television operation, departing from his role.
Stankey (pictured) has not made any other major changes under the new WarnerMedia vision, with HBO, Warner Bros., and Turner continuing as standalone units under the same leadership.
In an interview with the Variety website, Stankey said yesterday (Monday): “We intend to invest in these businesses to grow them. We want to make sure we’re investing aggressively in content.
“We expect we’ll want to innovate in the mobile space to demonstrate that there’s great opportunities to package and move content over mobile infrastructure in a way that can be accretive to the existing media model and not dilutive or detrimental to it.”
WarnerMedia has a significant interest in sports broadcasting in the US, with rights to Major League Baseball, the NBA basketball league and the March Madness college sports basketball competition.