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AT&T and DirecTV’s CEOs are on a conference call with investors this morning, pitching their $67 billion deal. Here’s the short version of the presentation, via slides the two companies are providing.
This one primarily mirrors what they’ve already put out in their release. One interesting note for TV rights-watchers: The slides list the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” package as one of DirecTV’s assets, even though that deal expires at the end of the upcoming NFL season, and the AT&T/DirecTV deal is supposed to take a year to close. So either DirecTV has renewed that deal and hasn’t announced it (unlikely), or DirecTV feels confident it can renew the deal (pretty likely).
Update: Asked about the NFL deal on the call, DirecTV CEO Mike White says he thinks he’ll have his deal renewed before the end of 2014 — before the AT&T transaction closes. “Nothing changes from my perspective,” he said. It is worth noting that DirecTV and the NFL were reportedly close to a deal back in December of 2013. And more recently, I had heard they were planning on finishing up later this summer.
And as the Los Angeles Times’s Joe Flint notes, it is theoretically possible for the NFL to break up the AT&T/DirecTV deal — or at least to give AT&T a reason to walk.
An investor filing today notes that AT&T can walk away from DirecTV if it doesn’t renew: “The parties also have agreed that in the event that DIRECTV’s agreement for the ‘NFL Sunday Ticket’ service is not renewed substantially on the terms discussed between the parties, the Company may elect not to consummate the Merger, but the Company will not have a damages claim arising out of such failure so long as DIRECTV used its reasonable best efforts to obtain such renewal.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
