AT&T CEO John Stankey said on Tuesday he is 'sad' and 'disappointed' that his attempt to take the company into the media streaming business didn't pay off.

On Monday, AT&T announced it was spinning off its media assets and merging them to create Discovery+.

It will create a behemoth in the streaming world and will rival Netflix and Disney.

But it also represents a failure by AT&T to make their own presence known in streaming after blowing $84billion on Time Warner in 2016.

Comcast had just made a similar move in acquiring NBCUniversal and the Time Warner deal was AT&T's shot at the industry.

But the deal wasn't finalized until 2018, after a series of anti-trust investigations and set-backs.

AT&T never launched their own streaming service as a result, and Netflix, Disney, Amazon and HBO Max soared to new heights by pumping billions into new content.

Stankey told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday he is 'sad' that he couldn't make it work for the company.

'The personal reaction is I’m a bit sad. I’m disappointed that the shift in the market that occurred caused us to have to step back and re-evaluate.'

He also blamed the failure on the antitrust proceedings which he says stalled it.

'You can’t cry over spilled milk, but had the transaction been approved a year earlier and not gone through the ridiculous approval process... [AT&T] would have had a leg up,' he said.

Stankey added that while telecomms and media could merge in the future, now is not the time.

'I won’t conclude that there isn’t possibly going to be that kind of reordering in the industry over time. But for right now…that’s probably a mismatch at this juncture,' he said.

Analysts say Stankey is now trying to undo two disastrous deals that he spearheaded.

'John [CEO John Stankey] rode shotgun on both of the big deals they have now unwound in the last few months [Time Warner and DirectTV]. He was very much a driver of the DirectTV deal and very much a driver of the Time Warner deal.

'It is rare that you see a management team and a board actually acknowledge so clearly that they made a terrible mistake and that they're willing to undo it. So I actually give them some credit for it.

'Now it's not to say it doesn't leave behind a tremendous amount of wreckage, right?

'I mean they spent $175 billion for these assets and then three years later, they are unwinding those positions for what is kind of in theory, I guess, about $80 billion or so. So they destroyed a ton of value, but not many companies are willing to admit they made a mistake right away,' Craig Moffett told Yahoo Finance Live.

Now, the company is worth $39billion less than it was in 2016 and $65billion less than it did in 2019.

There's no one reason for the huge plummet, especially when factoring in how the COVID-19 pandemic sank almost every sector.

The new, as-yet unnamed company, will be the second largest media company in the world after Disney and it's already promising to spend more on new content than Netflix, the market leader for streaming.

The deal was carved out in secret, and WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar knew nothing about it.

AT&T's share price was around $35 in 2016 when it announced the deal to buy Time Warner. Now, it is $29.59 - 17 percent less.

In 2016, its market capitalization was $263billion. It soared to $289billion in 2019.

That plummeted in 2020, along with every other company in the world, by and large, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. But even now, it is $224billion.

The CEO of Discovery, David Zaslav, told reporters at a call on Monday that he and AT&T CEO John Stankey, had met over the last few months 'secretly from my brownstone in Greenwich Village' to organize the deal, which will create a giant streaming service to rival Netflix.

Their conversation had begun three months earlier in February after Zaslav emailed to lament how the COVID-19 pandemic had led to the cancellation of the AT&T Pebble Beach golf tournament in California, where the two friends had planned to meet, Reuters reported.

The email - which included emojis of a golf player and the sunglass emoji - resulted in a two-hour conversation between the men, which quickly turned to the subject of mergers and acquisitions.

A WarnerMedia spokesman told DailyMail.com Kilar remained CEO of WarnerMedia, and said his sole focus was continuing the 'momentum the company has going on and the upcoming global expansion of HBO Max'.

In a message to staff on Monday morning, Kilar called it a 'defining moment' for the company and thanked them for their hard work.

Discovery's share price soared by nearly 10 percent on Monday morning before ending the day 5% down at $33.85.

AT&T's rose by 2 percent after opening bell before closing the day down 2.67% at $31.37