Comments
Ariella
10/21/2016 2:12:47 PM
User Rank Author
AT&T
Yes, another indication of the telecom giant's move in the programming direction. But it's all very hush-hush according to the Bloomberg report: "The informal talks with Time Warner executives have been aimed at building relations between the companies rather than establishing the terms of a specific transaction, the people familiar with those discussions said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are private." The article also mentions that it would likely to take a full 12 months to close the deal.
The more things change...
Lest we forget that Comcast (as we know it today) is the result of AT&T selling them AT&T Broadband which was itself created largely from TCI which they bought just a few years before from John Malone. They then started developing and depolying U-Verse as a broadband/"cable" TV replacement. And then of course Direct TV.
My calculator doesn't have a wide enough screen to determine how much $$ this all adds up to but competitively, my gut tells me AT&T has spent a few hundred billion the end up where they started 15 years ago.
Re: The more things change...
Ah, good points Jim. And I'll add MediaOne into that mix as well. Then there was SBC turning into AT&T.
Re: The more things change...
yep. And a few cellular companies. Has anyone ever done an analysis to see how much money traded hands over the past X number of years and which of these deals have resulted in greater revenue or stock price and how much simply evaporated?
I pretty much know the answer to "how many of these resulted in a better customer experience."
afwriter
10/21/2016 5:24:46 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: The more things change...
I know that the government would never allow for a total monopoly, but that is always where my mind jumps when I hear about company mergers. I'm sure it would be more economical for the two to merge, but I would much rather just see a partnership of some kind.
afwriter
10/21/2016 9:40:21 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: It's happening
That is insane! The first thing that popped into my mind when I read the article is that AT&T is going to leverage HBO in some way to steal subscribers from other service providers. No matter what, this is a huge merger in a short amount of time.
JohnBarnes
10/21/2016 11:05:16 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: It's happening
afwriter, Mike,
Have to agree. That's insanely fast motion. Which makes me think that the real talks must have been going on in secret for a long, long time.
Formalized alliances/federations/fusions/whatever between service and content providers are changing so fast and so drastically that I really have to wonder if the problem isn't that we just don't have a good institutional model for them; licensing agreements, mergers, purchases, provider contracts, etc etc etc all have elements of what a service provider and a content distributor need to team up, but none of them have all of it, and all of them have some baggage in the form of hindrances and work-arounds. Ultimately we may need a new form of legal agreement, created and drafted by legislators, to be able to do what needs doing without having to do too much else.
clrmoney
10/22/2016 10:26:24 AM
User Rank Platinum
AT&T and Time Warner Merger
They should get time warner and they used to be popular now thier outcompeted by other companies so this would be a plus for them.
Re: AT&T
@Ariella: Well, it certainly seems that they had to do something. What else were they gonna do? Rely on Uverse? ;)
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