Five years ago this week… AT&T revealed disastrous end-of-year earnings, losing 403,000 satellite TV subscribers for its fourth quarter of 2018, bringing its yearly cord cutter total to some 1.2 million. The telco’s streaming platform DirecTV Now (now DirectTV Stream) was not doing much better, with 267,000 fleeing the service, caused largely by an AT&T promotional strategy shift which executives claimed boosted ARPU. Then-CEO Randall Stephenson claimed the user base paying full price for the offering had actually grown—although he did not provide numbers for this. AT&T later spun off DirecTV into a joint venture with private equity firm TPG, which took a 30% stake in the telco’s video services, in August 2021. France’s Canal+, part of Vivendi Group, has made a…