TIMELINE-AT&T's biggest deals over the last decade

(A TIMELINE is a sidebar that lists in chronological order events related to a major news story)

May 17 (Reuters) - AT&T Inc spent billions of dollars over the last few years buying media assets, including Time Warner and DirecTV as it looked for growth beyond an increasingly competitive cellular market.

With a spin off of its media assets to Discovery Inc on Monday and the sale of it stake in DirecTV to buyout firm TPG Capital earlier this year, AT&T is now working on streamlining its business, paying down its debt and focusing on expanding its 5G network.

Discovery acquired Scripps Networks Interactive Inc for $11.9 billion in 2017 and the Oprah Winfrey Network last year for about $36 million.

Here is a timeline of AT&T's largest deals over the last ten years:

2012 - Acquired the equity of NextWave Wireless Inc for up to $50 million and took on $550 million of the company's debt (https://reut.rs/3owxBmc)

2013 - Bought prepaid wireless provider Leap Wireless International Inc in a deal valued at about $4 billion. The deal included a large debt component (https://reut.rs/3bxueGq)

2014 - Bought satellite TV provider DirecTV for $48.5 billion (https://reut.rs/3ftepkY)

2016 - Agreed to buy media firm Time Warner Inc for $85 billion, in the boldest move by a telecoms company to buy content to stream over its network (https://reut.rs/2S4UdOc)

2020 - Agreed to sell its Crunchyroll anime business to Sony's Fumination Global Group LLC in $1.18 billion deal. The deal gave Sony access to Crunchyroll's 3 million paying subscribers (https://reut.rs/3tXLk6q)

2021 - Agreed to sell one-third of its stake in DirecTV to buyout firm TPG Capital in a deal valuing the business at about $16 billion, well below what it paid for the asset less than six years earlier (https://reut.rs/3yf10pk) (Reporting by Eva Mathews and Tiyashi Datta in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)