AT&T nears deal to buy Time Warner :sadcam:

[Atsym Sknyfs]

fcc claimed it would make an unfair situation with ATT and Tmobile combining. SMH

First Comcast deal fell through...
then the Charter deal fell through...
Now AT&T is on the clock

With them already owning DirectTV I am not sure how the FCC allows this.

Must be a tumultous time to be a TW employee.

FCC wont block cause the see satallite and wired cablt tv as 2 separate entities..

ohhh. this aint the cable company its even better... wonder if the CW and DC comic's is included (edit yep)

if they doing the unlimited for att wireless with directv .. i wonder what they'll do with hbo and whatnot

 

[Rekkapryde]

Time Warner and Time Warner Cable (Spectrum) are separate companies

But time warner owns the majority of the shares of Time Warner Cable. shyt is crooked with these spinoffs

 

[Lord Scion]

Ma Bell season has returned.

 

[Milk N Cookies]

Ma Bell season has returned.

She never left

 

[NatiboyB]

I thought charter bought time warner

Is charter also spectrum? I just came back home
And now I have spectrum time warner

 

[Outlaw]

Is charter also spectrum? I just came back home
And now I have spectrum time warner

Once they merged they became spectrum which is why this story is so confusing to me

 

[SleezyBigSlim]

the fukk is going on these people have no shame

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AT&T Inc. is near an agreement to acquire Time Warner Inc. in a deal that values the company at about $110 a share, people with knowledge of the matter said.

That values Time Warner at about $86 billion, based on the company’s outstanding common shares. The structure of the deal will be about a 50-50 cash and stock split, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is private.

A combination of AT&T and Time Warner would form a media empire that will own many of the movies and TV shows it pumps through to subscribers of its wireless, internet and pay-TV services.


Time Warner closed at $89.48 on Friday in New York, giving it a market value of about $70 billion. A price of $110 a share would reflect a premium of about 23 percent.

An agreement could be approved Sunday and announced as soon as Monday, the people said. Talks are ongoing and a deal could still fall through, the people said.

Representatives of the companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

Wait. Didn't someone else just buy Time Warner

 

[Czerka]

The Switch

Why the rumored AT&T merger with Time Warner is such a huge deal
By Brian Fung, Drew Harwell

October 21, 2016 at 2:57 PM

(Chris Rank/Bloomberg News)
In what some analysts are calling an unprecedented “seismic shift” for the media and technology world, AT&T may soon buy the entertainment company Time Warner, a deal that could turn the legacy telecom carrier into a media titan the likes of which America has never seen.

A combination between the two companies could rival some of the biggest mergers in history, with AT&T potentially gaining control over hugely valuable brands spanning television, film, sports, news, video games and mobile and residential Internet service.

Bloomberg News reported that AT&T is close to buying Time Warner, whose roots date back to a 1920s magazine and film studio, for about $86 billion and that a deal could finalize over the weekend. Time Warner stock jumped nearly 8 percent in regular trading and another 5 percent after hours.

The potential merger highlights one of the most definitive trends of the modern media business: the push from tech and telecommunications giants to control the lucrative, popular content they once passively supplied.

It follows a wave of dealmaking and consolidation that could radically transform viewers' leisure time and media spending, including Comcast's purchase of NBCUniversal, Google's push into live-TV streaming, and the original-programming investments of Amazon and Netflix.

That big wave of media change, analysts said, could just be getting started. Apple approached Time Warner about a potential combination deal several months ago and continues to watch negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reportedFriday, citing unnamed sources. Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A merger between AT&T and Time Warner would be a historic deal. For starters, it could suddenly give AT&T control over a massive number of the world's most valuable media brands. It would complete the transformation by the wireless carrier — already the nation's second-largest — into a fully fledged entertainment powerhouse, launching an entirely new chapter in the history of the telecommunications giant. And it would be no less monumental for the rest of the communications industry, a rapidly consolidating area of business in which Internet providers are increasingly playing a central role in how consumers work and play.

Never before has a telecom company the size of AT&T sought to buy up a content firm like Time Warner, according to Craig Moffett, an industry analyst at MoffettNathanson.

“A [telecom company] owning content is something that was expressly prohibited for a century” by the government, Moffett said, “and even now, it raises all kinds of unique questions.”

The tie-up could see AT&T gain ownership over a dizzying array of household names. Time Warner — not to be confused with Time Warner Cable, which sold itself to Charter Communications earlier this year — owns HBO, meaning that AT&T could soon have the rights to “Game of Thrones,” “Westworld” and “True Detective.” It would control some of the most successful TV content in history, such as “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” It could also benefit from all the subscription revenue from HBO, the most profitable cable subscription business in history, whose 130 million subscribers on cableand on HBO's online streaming app pay about $15 a month.

AT&T would also own all the channels associated with the Turner Broadcasting System, including TNT, which is available in nearly 100 million pay-TV households. This means that shows such as “The Last Ship,” “Falling Skies” and “The Librarians” would be controlled, ultimately, by AT&T. The telecom could also own Turner Classic Movies and TBS, which includes programming such as “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and coverage of Major League Baseball. Under the Turner banner is an array of other sports programming, too, such as the Bleacher Report, NCAA.com and NBA Digital, a partnership with the National Basketball Association. For sports fans, this could mean much of the way they experience March Madness would be indirectly controlled by AT&T.

Also potentially falling into AT&T's hands would be the news channel CNN and its multinational operations. From political debate coverage to on-scene reports about hurricanes, tuning into CNN would mean more revenue for AT&T.

AT&T could come to own all of Warner Bros., which includes not only the Warner Bros. movie studio (which produced the hit “Harry Potter” films, “Inception” and “American Sniper”) but also New Line Cinema (which is responsible for the “Lord of the Rings” films, “Wedding Crashers” and even “The Notebook."). Warner Bros. also controls DC Comics, meaning AT&T would have the rights to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and a whole host of other pop culture icons.

Time Warner could also offer AT&T lucrative media gold mines beyond traditional TV. The company’s Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment division is one of America’s most prominent video-game publishers, helping develop the “Lego” series, the “Batman: Arkham” series and bestsellers like “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.” That division made more than $2 billion in revenue last year alone.

Time Warner was the fourth-largest media company in America last year, with roughly $28 billion in revenue. Its film division has averaged roughly $4.5 billion in annual box office sales over the last five years. This year, it is the second-highest-grossing studio, behind Disney, having pulled in more than $1.5 billion from movies such as “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” “Suicide Squad” and “Central Intelligence.”

In short, an AT&T-Time Warner tie-up would create one of the most powerful combinations of content and distribution America has ever seen. And the implications would be far-reaching: AT&T could offer intricate cross-promotions between different parts of its business, similar to the way it has started bundling cellular service with DirecTV, the satellite TV company it purchased last year. It could make money by licensing shows and movies to other cable companies, and also compete against them by fleshing out the offerings of its own U-verse pay-TV service.

A deal would come to epitomize the rapid, dramatic changes affecting the media and technology space. Content producers and cable companies alike are grappling with new Internet business models, seeking fresh ways to distribute their shows online as more consumers consider ditching the traditional cable bundle. Americans' media consumption is shifting to mobile devices, which is encouraging firms such as AT&T to bet big on wireless connectivity and forcing providers of fixed broadband to hunt for new ways to compete. Industries that previously had been insulated from one another by the limits of technology are now being forced to contend with each other as entertainment and communications converge on the Internet.

In 2011, Comcast became one of the first companies to acknowledge the trend by buying up NBCUniversal, which created a media and distribution conglomerate that now controls theme parks, television shows and access to the Internet. At the time, antitrust regulators permitted the acquisition under certain conditions designed to keep Comcast from using the combined company to squeeze out the competition. But some analysts say those conditions weren't effective — and that AT&T may face similar concerns.

“This would probably not be a slam dunk with regulators that likely have second thoughts after watching the ineffectiveness of behavioral remedies for the approval of Comcast’s acquisition of NBC,” said Walt Piecyk, a telecom analyst at BTIG.

The atmosphere for mergers and acquisitions grew even dimmer in 2015, when the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice moved to block Comcast's attempted purchase of Time Warner Cable. Federal officials argued that the deal would give Comcast so many Internet subscribers that it could use them as leverage against online businesses that needed access to Comcast's customers.

Regulators would probably raise the same issues this time. It's unlikely they would let AT&T put Time Warner's content on its wireless or home Internet platform on an exclusive basis, analysts say. Nor would the government be eager to allow AT&T to exempt Time Warner programming from cellular data caps.

“There'd be an enormous competitive concern about self-dealing, favoring their own properties to the detriment of competition,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former antitrust official at the Justice Department who is now the president of the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Based on the restrictions regulators may impose to address those concerns, a merger between AT&T and Time Warner may be more trouble than it's worth, Moffett said.

“There's no industrial logic to combining content and distribution,” he said. “It sounds good in theory, but it doesn't hold up very well when you poke at it.

“I don't think you can give a merger like this much better than 50-50 odds,” he added.

Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecommunications and the Internet. Before joining the Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic.

Drew Harwell is a national business reporter at The Washington Post.

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[Sulu]

Ok, I was at first.

I was like damn didn't they just get bought out by that Spectrum company with the corny ass commercial.

I bet you know that customer service number by heart tho







One niiinneee Niinnnnne ninnnneeeee

 

[Homey the clown]

This is a little off topic but the current At&t Inc is not even the original At&t it's really Southwestern Bell aka SBC which brought out the original At&t in 2005 and then re-branded as the new At&t. Just like At&t Mobility which is the wireless subsidiary of At&t is really Cingular Wireless which was a joint venture of SBC and Bellsouth.Cingular purchased the original At&t wireless in 2004 but when SBC and Bell south merged they decided to re-brand Cingular as At&t Mobility in 2007 because they said At&t had more name recognition even though at the time Cingular was the #1 mobile phone provider.If you type in Cingular on Wikipedia it goes straight to At&t Mobility so it's the same company. Sorry for getting off topic I just read a lot of corporate history and things like this are interesting to me.

 

[videogamestashbox.com]

I'm from B'ham which is an AT&T hub and a huge chunk of my family works(ed) for AT&T. Alot of them also with stock(I know my fam got stock from the company a while back) so thats good news to me...

That said I'm laughing because AT&T was broken up into "baby bells" at one point. My parents worked for "bell south" before they recombined all the baby bells back into AT&T. It sounds like AT&T is "back on the war path" so to speak.
Sidenote: I need to lookup when was the last time the FCC broke up a company as they did AT&T in the 70's-80's

Breakup of the Bell System - Wikipedia

 

[Atsym Sknyfs]

What they are doing now isn't breaking any anti trusts laws... FCC looks at cable and satellite and wireless and the content as all separate types of entities

 

[surgical gloves]

This is a little off topic but the current At&t Inc is not even the original At&t it's really Southwestern Bell aka SBC which brought out the original At&t in 2005 and then re-branded as the new At&t. Just like At&t Mobility which is the wireless subsidiary of At&t is really Cingular Wireless which was a joint venture of SBC and Bellsouth.Cingular purchased the original At&t wireless in 2004 but when SBC and Bell south merged they decided to re-brand Cingular as At&t Mobility in 2007 because they said At&t had more name recognition even though at the time Cingular was the #1 mobile phone provider.If you type in Cingular on Wikipedia it goes straight to At&t Mobility so it's the same company. Sorry for getting off topic I just read a lot of corporate history and things like this are interesting to me.

Yep, I've had att Internet since it was still sbc,
Shyyyyt an email address that I still use has sbcglobal in it
I remember having cingular as well, crazy how I ended up with the same company for both services

 

[Ciggavelli]

Let's hope the gov disapproves. AT&T is going ma bell again. I have AT&T for my cellphone (I was originally a Cingular customer), but their internet and cable sucks.

If they block HBO Go on my devices (I have Verizon Fios now), I'm back to stealing TV.

 

[street heat]

Let's hope the gov disapproves. AT&T is going ma bell again. I have AT&T for my cellphone (I was originally a Cingular customer), but their internet and cable sucks.

If they block HBO Go on my devices (I have Verizon Fios now), I'm back to stealing TV.

uverse is good it just depends on your location. you mean frontier fios ?

why would they block HBO Go ? AT&T wants you do enjoy content any way you like it. mobile, broadband, a la carte....whatever. no other company will be able to deliver content in as many ways as AT&T. fiber to the home, GFast over copper (work in progress), 5G LTE (which may also provide broadband to the home at gigabit speeds), and Satellite....