Will Time Warner Feed AT&T’s Hunger for Mobile Video?

For AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson, grabbing ownership of great video content that his company could offer through its mobile services was a key reason for his $85.4 billion deal to buy Time Warner. “Premium content always wins,” he said in October after the deal was announced. “It has been true on the big screen, the TV screen, and now it’s proving true on the mobile screen.”

Just how successfully that maxim can be applied to the cell phone universe remains to be seen. User-generated and social-media-shared content—think cat videos or clips of James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke—are among the big drivers of mobile video. Getting smartphone users, who tend to watch shorter pieces, to consume much of Time Warner’s long-form content on their tiny screens won’t be easy.