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AT&T Considers Buying Time Warner (bloomberg.com)
In what would likely be one of the largest telecommunications takeovers in American history, Bloomberg is reporting that ATT has discussed the idea of a possible merger or other partnership with Time Warner Inc (may be paywalled; alternate source). Bloomberg reports: The talks, which at this stage are informal, have focused on building relations between the companies rather than establishing the terms of a specific transaction, the people said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are private. Neither side has yet hired a financial adviser, the people said. Acquiring Time Warner would give ATT, one of the biggest providers of pay-TV and of wireless and home internet service in the U.S., a collection of popular programming to offer to subscribers, from HBO to NBA basketball to the Cartoon Network. ATT CEO Randall Stephenson has been looking to add more content and original programming as part of his plan to transform the Dallas-based telecommunications company into a media and entertainment giant. Time Warner Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bewkes is a willing seller if he gets an offer he thinks is fair, said one of the people. Bewkes and his board rejected an $85-a-share approach in 2014 from Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox Inc., which valued Time Warner at more than $75 billion. Last year, ATT paid $48.5 billion to acquire satellite-TV provider DirecTV, its biggest deal in at least 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ATT has been developing an internet-based version of the pay-TV service, called DirecTV now.
Someone needs to tell AT&T's board that you can't push your company to infinite suckiness and wrap around to the universe of good customer service. There is no singularity at the bottom of that black hole.
Do not fuck with HBO!
Dear AT&T,
We already tried it. It didn't work out so well. You should learn from our mistakes.
Sincerely,
AOL
Wasn't TWC just swallowed up by Comcast?
How about buying Yahoo too then they can be the unholy trinity:
The most despised web search engine, a highly reviled telecommunications company, and a cable company (they're all evil).
EA will be relegated to only the 2nd most evil entity on earth.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
They were bought up by another company and are now known as "Spectrum".
AT&T was broken up (by a REGAN congress, of all things).
How did we get back to this point??
This is going to be fun!
Ezekiel 23:20
AAAAAH.
Why don't these large corporations stop buying up other large corporations to create gigantic monopolies, and instead focus their spending on satisfying their customers? Oh, right... because they're greedy.
Bite my shiny metal ass!
The Feds should block this one if it ever comes close to being attempted. We have an absolute dearth of competition as it stands now. I looked at moving from Time Warner for my internet and found AT&T is the only option in my area. TW is okay, but overpriced and I have never heard a good thing about AT&T. Allow the two to combine and I get the worst of both worlds.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
soon all corporations will merge into one uncontrollable entity that will do whatever it wants everywhere
The only economic system the West hasn't tried on a serious level is Distributism and sadly, Distributism is the only system that answers this economic problem of having a faustian bargain of monopolies or government control. When a business has to operate on that dichotomy, society turns over the work to a non-profit corporation that manages the infrastructure as a social good, works fairly with the private sector and is sufficiently powerful to resist undue political pressure.
If that sounds almost feudal, well it is influenced by the old feudal system. Under Distributism, such a corporation would not be state owned. It would be the equivalent of a feudal lord with a letter patent granting rights and authority to operate. That means Congress could still act and force its hand, but it would take Congress acting with a serious majority and mandate.
I was going to say 'instead invest in improving their infrastructure.'
The Time Warner that ATT wants is Warner Bros content, and cable content like Cartoon Network. Time Warner Cable is the cable and Internet provider which was purchased by Spectrum. This clearly an attempt by ATT to compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Guess I need to re-read works by GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, leading proponents of Distributism about a century ago, on that. My takeaway was the notion that no big legal entities were to be allowed, whether corporations or governments - all economic "units" were to be family-based, and thus highly atomized. Bigness per se was to be avoided, and personal involvement maximized. Maybe medieval style guilds of like trades had a place in the scheme, but I don't think that included their heavy-handed rule by a guild master, or entry barriers for newcomers; maybe more like current agricultural co-ops in the US?
Needless to say, with every distributist being "independent" they had trouble combining to have any effective influence on public policy to those ends.
Got any good links to your Distributist understanding?
...because some old time execs at AT&T want to party like it's 1982 again!
Content provider and content producer merging is a major risk, especially when both are effective monopolies in their markets.
What ever happened to antitrust? The Bell telephone system was broken up in 1984, and now we are going back to one telecommunications company.
We don't have enough competition. The FCC has already allowed content distributors to be owned by Media Companies (Comcast/NBC as example). We need MORE internet freedom, not legalized cartels. What we are seeing is CORRUPTION, where the money from corporate interests is more important to regulatory approvals than the needs of the people. It's funny how the "freeest country in the world" is getting more controlled while former regimes like Germany and much of Europe are freeer and have much more competition than the US, and their governments protect the citizenry from this sort of thing much more than the US.
My own situation, I have TWC for internet and my only other choice for relatively high speed is ATT UVerse. So we want to combine those pitiful two choices into no choice at all?
AT&T sucks on the customer service and billing side. TWC sucks on the signal reliability side. When they merge, they'll cover the full spectrum of suckage. Perhaps that's why TWC is changing its name to "Spectrum".
Table-ized A.I.
OK, allow the purchase to take place. But then apply the FCC's authority over common carriers to the entire entity. Because nobody can be expected to pry apart the (necessarily proprietary) entanglements, cross division subsidies and preferential pricing deals that the separate parts can engage in.
Time Warner, you want a federal regulator crawling around in the studio system (as close to organized crime as this country permits to exist)? Have fun.
Have gnu, will travel.