Are you a frustrated Samsung customer? Annoyed by the lack of 4K content outside of Netflix? Well, DirecTV has your back, sorta. DirecTV (NASDAQ: DTV) is partnering up with Samsung (KRX: 005930) to release a bunch of UHD content for any and all Samsung 4K TVs released in 2014. These TVs already have DirecTV built into them and do not require a receiver be directly connected to them in order for them to receive TV service.

The real big deal here is not the built-in DirecTV service, which has been available for quite some time, but rather the fact that now DirecTV will be serving 4K video through their DirecTV Genie HD DVR devices to Samsung TVs in glorious 4K. This service currently only offers 19 films to consumers in UHD. Many of the films are remastered in 4K, but that doesn’t change the fact that Samsung’s 4K portfolio was close to nil when they launched these 4K TVs. Sony was the only place you could really get access to a sizable library of 4K content as Samsung only included 5 movies in their Samsung UHD Video Pack on a 1TB hard drive with their curved UHD TVs earlier this year.

Thankfully for Samsung owners, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) already offers a pretty sizable library of 4K content including both House of Cards and Breaking Bad as well as a few remastered movies and nature films. The expectation is that Netflix’s library will continue to increase in order to stay competitive with all other streaming services and Amazon who will inevitably do the same. If you consider how fast 4K is gaining adoption, there’s a very good chance that if cable providers don’t get on the 4K bandwagon quickly they will be left behind by the streaming providers that are finding a way to deliver 4K to consumers quickly and effectively. There is already talk of Comcast’s 4K video service, which will also supposedly launch on Samsung first, but it remains to be seen if that will use Comcast internet service or Comcast cable service.

The 4K content wars are heating up, but most of the studios and Blu-Ray are still missing. The studios are missing a huge opportunity to capitalize on the high price of 4K TVs and use that to their advantage to charge higher prices for 4K mastered content. The biggest problem is that Hollywood seems uninterested in launching 4K content even though the market is starving for it globally. So, as a result, a lot of older content is getting remastered. And the interesting thing is, if you look at the newer content that is doing well and already 4K ready like Breaking Bad or House of Cards that is because both productions took production into their own hands and did things their own way. As a result, both of them shot their entire productions in 4K and are the premiere content for Netflix 4K.

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There have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the telecom businesses, the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger is still up in the air and many people appear to be highly opposed to it. And naturally, it would come as little surprise that AT&T would look to merge/buy one of their competitors as well. After all, if a Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger were to go through, even after divestments they would essentially be a 30 million subscriber base company. That would be much bigger than AT&T’s current 5 million subscriber base, making them even less relevant in the TV space, so obviously, AT&T wants to expand their business size and their relevance in the TV business and they can’t do it with their subpar product and pricing. So what do they do? Acquire! Just like Comcast. So, AT&T would gobble up DIRECTV’s 20 million+ subscriber base and instantaneously become a real competitor with the potential Comcast-Time Warner Cable behemoth.

This would effectively leave consumers with 3 choices in TV, Comcast Time Warner, AT&T DIRECTV or DISH. The next biggest competitor would be Charter, whom would only be around 7 to 8 million subscribers, half of which had been divested to them by Comcast in order to make regulators happy about their acquisition of Time Warner Cable. And since we all know that none of these cable companies really compete with eachother, you’d realistically be dwindled down to a MUCH smaller group of companies to choose from. Not just that, but you’d also have fewer companies competing with each other for price  which means that we would most likely get even worse levels of service for more money than most of us are already paying today. In fact, AT&T’s merger with DIRECTV actually makes more competitive sense than Comcast’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable. This is primarily because AT&T is a fairly small player in the TV market with their UVerse service and DIRECTV doesn’t really serve very many users with internet. Plus, it would also put AT&T into the number one spot, eclipsing Comcast as the number one pay TV provider, which could actually spur some sort of competition, even though that’s very unlikely in today’s cable climate.

Ultimately, these mega mergers are a perfect example of the lack of competition in the market and the fact that these big companies are merely existing to get bigger and more monopolistic. None of these companies have really shown any good will towards customers and AT&T and Comcast are some of the most hated companies in existence today. I simply don’t see how current or future DIRECTV customers would benefit from having AT&T acquire the company, and the same goes for AT&T customers. This merely seems like a marketshare grab in order to gain favorable program pricing and expand their TV business without actually competing. In fact, AT&T is the only TV and internet provider that overlaps with many of the cable providers like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Comcast because they are technically a phone line provider (DSL) and are not technically a cable operator. However, AT&T never chose to compete with the cable operators and instead decided to offer slower internet speeds for more money than their competitors and more TV channels that nobody wants to watch.

DIRECTV’s stock [NASDAQ:DTV] is up over 5% or nearly $5 on the news and will likely continue to move upward as more information on the deal comes out.

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