Another phone company gets out of the media business.

Looks like WarnerMedia, the poison pill of the modern super-merger, is slated to become part of another media company, Discovery. This is the first merger WarnerMedia has been part of that makes sense in the last 20 years: content powerhouse with content powerhouse, each coming at content from a different angle appealing to different audiences.

When AOL bought TimeWarner in 2000, the price was a staggering $182 billion. AT&T bought TimeWarner for $85 billion just 3 years ago, a purchase is fought the Trump Administration's Justice Department to realize. Renamed WarnerMedia, AT&T looked to combine its data and mobile network pipes with a vast supply of content. Alas, as we saw recently with Verizon, phone companies are perhaps not the best overlords for media content. Now AT&T is letting it go for $43 billion.

What does this mean? AT&T will likely focus its resources on making 5G a reality. With that in place, its Himalayan mountains of data combined with liquifying speed can make AT&T an autobahn of media content distribution.

The continued migration to on-demand, any time, any where, content consumption means genuine cordless streaming has to get more powerful. When we talk about "cordless" or "cord cutting" now, it's a misnomer; there's still a cord, it's plugged into the router instead of the back of your TV or cable box. But delivery over a 5G network would truly be cordless, and can better enable the way people are more frequently consuming their media: on the seas and oceans, in the air, on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, an in the hills. And in that future, AT&T could be the preferred distribution partner of the new WarnerMedia/Discovery entity. Eh voila! The cable company of the future is born.