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Comcast Officially Gives Up On TWC Merger
An anonymous reader writes: Confirming speculation from yesterday, Comcast announced this morning that its attempt to merge with Time Warner Cable has been terminated. The announcement was very brief, but indicated that regulatory pressure was the reason they killed the deal. CEO Brian Roberts said, "Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn't agree, we could walk away." The Washington Post adds, "The move by regulators to throw up roadblocks shows that the government has grown concerned about massive media conglomerates bigfooting rivals that are finding success by streaming content over the Internet, analysts said. And after years of approving a wave of mergers in the industry — including that of Comcast and NBC Universal in 2011 — federal officials are taking a new tone, they said."
It is truly sad that we will be deprived of Time Warner getting the Customer Service that Comcast is (in)famous for, while at the same time Comcast getting the forward looking understanding of technology that Time Warner, a copyright focused company would have brought to the relationship.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I was tired of hearing those commercials.
Netflix, Amazon, Sling
Possibly Google, Apple, anyone else?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
It's nice to know that money can't always buy government representatives all the time.
Some things need to be said...
once new administration is in place and comcast squirts some more grease (err i mean, cash) around d.c... those 'regulatory pressures' might be a little more 'manageable'.
but i don't recall any 'mega merger' that was either rejected or called off, being re-done by the same participants later.
The government should continue investigating as a follow up, to see if Comcast has fully followed through with the promises/requirements of the NBC Universal purchase.
On both of them long ago.
This really suggests that the Comcast/TWC merger had more to do with empire building (or expanding an effective monopoly) than good business.
Too often, mergers and acquisitions are driven by ego and result in an overall conglomerate that is less efficient.
If anyone believes that Comcast is giving up, I have some swampland in the Sahara for sale too! I believe that Comcast made this announcement as a PR move, and will still be pursuing this merger behind the scenes in secret and we will only find out when they think they can succeed. What really needs to happen is that Comcast needs to be broken up into small municipal ISPs as should all of the ISPs. These municipal ISPs should then be run as not-for-profit public utilities, only able to charge customers actual cost for unlimited (without data caps) broadband service.
They'll simply bide their time, grease more palms, then try it once more after the hoohar has died down.
Ceo Roberts: take a message! "Today, we move on. The heralding of the 6th star of ocorium and the death of all that grows to chew the cud as the mighty beast arises has been circumvented. The runes of pestilence have not siphoned the blood of the babe, as was foretold in our prophetic lore of bundling. Today, we stand apart, our hellmouths never to entwine and form a new dead god. Comcast and Time warner will never be able to take our great products to new cities into which wrack and desolation shall grind the bones of the damned to dust, and succor a distant memory of a world once living. The government has seen fit to meddle in that which they can never understand, to oppose the will of Baal our dark lord and in so doing unlock the very amulet that is the dawn of their obliteration. We structured this amalgamation, or as you laughably know it as "the deal" in a pact of dark blood, an ichor stronger than christs own bleached bones, in that it may be transmutated and reformed should such blasphemous interference take place. Today, we walk this earth upon damned hooves of..." ....o...okay....so im just going to trim this up for tomorrows soundbyte o-on....on CNN, is that alri-
PR Executive:
CEO Roberts: Yes it must be hewn into a frame that fits the skull of a black ram to be delivered upon the masses as per the divination
PR Executive: uh...im thinking...8x11
CEO Roberts: Yes. use the eights of eleven to elucidate our will to the sheep. Dorris in accounting has a spare ream i believe.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Comcast will have to give us more money before we let them merge with Time Warner"
I'd be happy if Comcast were capable of bringing a "great" product to ANY city.
Does anyone know how much they spent on lobbying to get this to go through?
"...we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities..." I'm not American, but as I understand somehow cities are run by one ISP only or something like that? Wouldn't a better approach for them "to bring our great products to new cities" be to lobby and break this system so that they can enter new cities alongside their competitors? Maybe build some healthy competition? Yeah yeah, I know, that'll never happen... but somebody should at least call them on their crap, since this would be the best way for them to get to do what they want to do.
"Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn't agree, we could walk away"
"...and besides, fuck you."
I would actually like to see them do this. Not as monopoly, but as competition.
Ding dong the witch is temporarily delayed until a more extensive lobbying campaign can be organized!
Maybe they should focus on having great products first. I have yet to find an ISP that is even close to great.
This is far from over. This was just the first skirmish in a war that is going to last for some time. I have the feeling that a number of politicians are going to be surprisingly well funded in the next election.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The merger may be off, for now, but that does not mean that there will be no collusion and behaviors of a merged company down the line. Proxies are not something new in terms of abusing monopoly powers.
Sure, I am glad this deal is off. At the same time, I don't trust these mega companies holding monopolies to do the right thing.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
From Consumerist, where I got this news a couple hours ago: "Comcast wonâ(TM)t want to sit idle; theyâ(TM)ve got $45 billion burning a hole in their pocket and will want to spend it on something."
Gee, maybe if they would take that 45 billion dollars and invest it in not totally freaking sucking at everything, the public wouldn't hate them so much and want to block their attempts to get any bigger than they already are? Maybe invest in internal infrastructure and better processes so that they don't keep getting egg on their face for yet another boneheaded thing they did every other month?
That said, it is pretty impressive that the US government is actually doing their job for once, of protecting us against corporations with giant moneybags wanting to come in and screw us over for their profits, instead of just taking the bribe^Hdonation and rolling over like normal. Good job! (Until next time.)
Strangely enough, I've been on Comcast since my AT&T@Home service got absorbed by them in something like 2002 and I can only think of one issue I've run into; it was activating a CableCard in an uncommon Digital Cable Ready TV (rather than a more typical TiVo or similar). It took them coming out and spending hours fiddling around and calling successively higher internal tech support folks until finally getting that working. That was years ago. Since then I've activated an HTPC CableCard (twice) and two TiVos with no issue. The last one was super-easy and required only going down to the local office to pick up the CableCard itself (waited in line probably 2 minutes total) then one phone call to activate it. The office even suggested how I could save some money by turning in currently-unused equipment even if I might want it again later. They were friendly and suggested I could just pick up similar equipment again in the future when I'll actually be using it. They could have easily just keep their mouths shut and continued charging for it.
Sure, I've had an outage here and there, but quite rarely, and only for very short periods over the years, and none of my interactions with customer service have been bad. In fact, back when they first rolled out their 105Mbps service I fairly easily convinced them to apply it to an existing bundle and deduct the proportional cost of the standard Internet that was already in the bundle, even though that service option technically wasn't available. The discount has stayed active for years since. They did still charge me the fairly large installation fee for the 105 service, but now I have new RG6 run throughout the house and my signal strength is so high I have to use an attenuator to make the TiVo happy since they expect a more degraded signal and boost it internally when splitting out to the 6 tuners.
So, while I can appreciate that lots of other people may have had different experiences, I cannot, in good conscience, make any complaints at all about the service I have /personally/ received from Comcast as a long-time customer. I guess it must vary significantly in different areas of the country? And no, there's no major competitor here aside from far-slower DSL, so it's not just good service due to competition..
Bottom line on this subject, I suspect what may happen in lieu of the merger is that Comcast will simply start to "compete" (i.e. buy out, undercut, revise any needed legal agreements, or otherwise supersede) TWC and friends a few areas at a time until a similar goal is achieved, just more slowly. That MIGHT be an improvement in some cases as it could potentially drive prices down overall (at least for a while), but that remains to be seen. Short of getting actively broken-up, I'm not sure how this could really end significantly differently long-term.
... how the shareholders react, and whether any C-level heads roll over this apparent institutional overreach.
They could have already been bringing their "great" products to new cities without this merger. Though, that would have required *gasp* competing with other companies rather than carving out local monopolies to prevent having to compete with each other.
Comcast are being investigated. One of the conditions of the NBC Universal / Comcast deal was that HULU would remain independent from Comcast oversight. The WSJ (IIRC) reported that Comcast was directly involved in a meeting between high-level execs when HULU was being considered for sale. Comcast convinced the execs in question not to sell.
For the sake of 'the rest of us', glad to see that the sheer obscenity of something that was probably conceived as making sense in the minds of merger-happy investors and money managers didn't come to pass.
Before celebrating too much, let's keep in mind that this may just be a temporary reprieve. They are sure to try again.
Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but it turned out we don't actually have any. This took us by surprise but a quick poll among our executive staff came to the result that nobody actually knows how we make money or why we're still in business. Money comes in, certainly, and from what I could gather some of it is government money so we seem to be providing some kind of service, I guess. And some of it to the government, it seems. But the exact nature of this service remains a mystery.
Look, I only wanted to merge with Time Warner Cable because the guys over there seem to know what kind of business they're in and I figured it could be a learning experience. Now that that plan has been kiboshed, could anyone tell me what it is that we actually do? I heard some speculation that we do something with the internet but from what I can tell we don't have anything resembling a broadband infrastructure so that can't be it. We do have call centers but when I called one they didn't know anything about the internet, either. Perhaps we're some kind of telemarketing outfit?
Seriously, if anyone has an idea what our business plan is, please drop me a line at ceo@comca.st.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I have Cox and am thankful of it every time I even hear these twin pillars of suck mentioned. Absolutely rock-solid, with tech support people located within my own Podunk rural state.
That is all.
As a central florida resident who has Bright House for cable, whom I've been happy with up until now, now wait to see if Charter continues to court Bright House for a possible merger or even if they think the merger will be approved. Here is one of the stories about that potential merger.
I personally don't think we need any more cable companies merging.
Dear Comcast:
I know this is hard to figure out, but I found a map of areas that you could bring your products to.
Comcast and Time Warner in 1 Map
You can start by wiring those areas that are blue, then proceed into the areas that are white.
No need to thank me.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
There seems to be so little good news lately, that I just have to savor this for a while!
I understand this is a good thing in general.
However I kind of feel it sucks for me. I have TWC in my area and the best plan I can get is 100/5. 5 measly Mbps upload...
If we got Comcast instead I would have been able to get their 105/20 plan which would have quadrupled my upload speed.
I just want more upload and now that this sale is dead I feel like i'm years away before TWC ever increases their upload speeds...
Here's what Comcast said in their official press release-
“Today, we move on. Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away,"
Here's what Comcast didn't say in their official press release, but should have-
Now that we no longer have to 'play nice' to help get the merger approved, you can all expect big price increases in our monopolistic markets, reinstated data caps with BIG upcharges for those of you that stream the bulk of your video content instead of paying us for cable access, and further obfuscation of that silly agreement we made to provide low cost internet access for low income families!
We are still the 6000 lb gorilla of the industry and we will do anything we please. Just try to stop us!
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
I think THE biggest reason why the merger was called off was the very likely stipulation from the Federal government that Comcast must spin off NBC Universal to get the merger completed. Given how hard Comcast worked just to purchase NBC Universal in 2010, that was something they would not accept.
Personally, what I would have liked to see is allowing the merge of the retail arms and wholesale/infrastructure arms merged, but into separate respective entities, with a stipulation that the wholesale/infrastructure arm was explicitly not allowed to sell services to end users (ever); only to retail ISPs, at a regulated but fair rate and requirement to upgrade the network to FTTx as demand arises. It's a common model in a lot of other countries and for the most part, works pretty well.
That way, other ISPs could sell service on a whitelabel/unbundled/virtual network basis using [Comcast-TWC wholesale] infrastructure at competitive rates, and the retail arm of the newly combined [Comcast-TWC Retail] would now have to compete with multiple ISPs on the basis of service quality and customer support, rather than simply having their monopoly over their coverage areas.
Imagine if [Comcast-TWC Retail] had to compete with ISPs including but not limited to Sonic.net, Google Fiber, EPB, US Internet etc because they were now able to access all that infrastructure? They [Comcast-TWC retail] would basically be forced to clean up their act.
And even if upgrades were not stipulated in the deal, [Comcast-TWC wholesale] *could* still be incentivized to begin upgrading their service areas to an FTTx model, because the technology & infrastructure is all they would have to worry about/concentrate on now, and their wholesale ISP customers could/would/should demand it.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)