comcrap NOT to buy ishy time warner
 

Damn

There's no way this goes through. No way they let #1 buy #2 without forcing them to divest a bunch of stuff.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/...-warner-cable/

The story is that Charter, who had been trying to buy Time Warner (resisted takeover), may buy the divested assets.

I'd imagine that they'd have to divest so much to make it worthwhile to the antitrust regulators that how could it make any sense for Comcast?

But then again I'm probably dreaming and it'll probably be a "slap on the wrist" divestment.

I'm a massive Comcast hater. I have to give them props, though. In my area atleast, Comcast On Demand has changed in a great way. Basically everything show on TV is on there now. Some have back seasons. I watch it more than Netflix.

I looked at Comcast's website after hearing about this to see what it might mean for my internet bill.

I need to send Comcast a bill for new underpants.

Finding new ways to make our cable and broadband even worse in this country. Quite impressive.

I just use Comcast for the internet. Over the Air (with Tivo) and Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime (well, I never watch anything on Prime - its just an add on for the free 2 day shipping) for me.

The only TW product I have is Internet, so it hopefully won't be too bad. If it is bad, I'll switch back to Windstream.

When I moved from Chicago to Maine I had to switch from a, frankly, great TV/Internet provider (Wide Open West: http://www.wowway.com/home-map) to Time Warner. The difference is staggering.

Nothing works consistently, customer service is hopeless, and TWC quite obviously throttles bandwidth drastically throughout much of the day.

When Time Warner bought Insight, I heard horror stories. But in the year since they took over, the broadband is still great and the cable is still mediocre and I haven't had any issues when dealing with their customer service.

My opinion too. The TWC app has been awesome to use on my roku on my other tv's and out tablets. Speed has been mostly good, but I have been getting some connection hiccups and slowdowns here and there.

Ugh- no kidding. Even less competition in a market that already didn't have enough players.

SI

You see, stevew, it is possible for people to make posts on a passionate topic without using vulgar language. Try it sometimes.

Definitely hate the thought of this merger.

Anyway, for my area at least, I'm hopeful that this'll make TWC better, mostly on the assumption that my service can't get any worse.

Do you guys need them for internet of something? I am not even a cut the cord guy but have found Directv to be 1000x better than Charter Cable here in St. Louis. (I think Charter was trying to buy Time Warner initially)

I've never ever had anything but issues with dish solutions.

I am the rare person who actually likes Comcast. I've only ever had minor issues with their service and I've found most of the people I've dealt with - either in person or over the phone - to be pretty helpful and responsive. They aren't batting 100, but overall I've been quite pleased.

That being said, the amount I pay for internet and cable is pretty outrageous.

I have no experience with Time Warner. I've only heard horror stories, but I imagine if I had no experience with Comcast, I would only hear the same.

I had DirecTv one year, in 2005. I thought the service was fine. I liked the TiVo interface. I had a few issues, but not many. It wasn't until we cancelled the service - we moved from DC to Michigan - that I really soured on them. They were annoying and relentless when it came to cancelling. They kept hounding us and made the entire process difficult and irritating. As a result, I have a pretty negative opinions about them.

Here is a quick and dirty analysis from a legal antitrust perspective, without examining anything or reading anything about this merger:

As for this merger, it will be interesting to see how it plays out. I am not sure if Time Warner and Comcast really compete with one another. Are there any areas in the U.S. where both are offered? If there are such overlaps, then I would imagine there might be a divestiture of the services in the area, though the merging parties will argue for a broader market definition that includes satellite and the phone service TV/internet offerings

I imagine the relevant markets would be twofold: TV and high-speed internet. The parties will argue that satellite TV and AT&T and Verizon Fios' services (where offered) compete with cable and, therefore, the merger isn't a 2 to 1, but a 5 to 4 or 6 to 5, depending on the market, since you would include Dish, DirecTv, AT&T and Verizon (where offered) in that market analysis.

The high-speed internet market would also likely include AT&T and Verizon FIOs as competitors. So, again, it's not a merger to monopoly, but a 4 to 3.

In many local markets there is also a local cable player. For example, in Metro Detroit there is Wow Cable. I haven't heard good things about it, but it's out there and another potential competitive constraint to the merging parties.

I've had TWC Business Class at my house for my Internet connection since I moved in. It has been great. I'm a bit concerned about how this merger is going to affect that. Unfortunately I don't think there is much of a chance of Google Fiber, AT&T Uverse, FIOS or Grande Communications bringing their service out here for a bit of competition.

I've heard a lot of crappy things about Comcast, but never had any personal experience with them. As a TWC customer, I am holding my breath and hoping nothing major changes...the only other option I have around here is AT&T.

I have no complaints with Comcast beyond price. My FIOS connection was twice the speed(upload, what matters to me) for almost 50% the cost.

Cost aside, my Comcast connection is blazing fast down, adequate up and has been rock solid.

Yeah, honestly...service wise, I don't really have a problem with Comcast.

They just RAPE you on price, because they can.

Yes. Yes, the can. They can do this with or without Time Warner. The barriers to entry into this market are incredibly high given the investment needed for the actual infrastructure.

Based on what I know, people try to get a lower price by threatening to switch providers, and getting the Comcast person on the phone to lower their prices for six months or so. I've never heard of anyone claiming to switch to Time Warner. Here, at least, it's always Dish, DirecTV or AT&T.

The other area that is likely to be examined by antitrust regulators, and likely to be the bigger potential issue, is whether the deal will give Comcast too much power in negotiations with cable networks. Will, as a result of this deal, Comcast be able to force cable networks to take less in order to be aired on Comcast's networks?

We already see a bunch of these disputes all of the time, with certain cable networks temporarily dropping from provider's services because they couldn't come to an agreement on price. I distinctly remember when AMC was off Dish for a while, because the gravely voice-over guy for "The Walking Dead" kept reminding me that I couldn't watch it on Dish.

These arguments may be more nuanced. I assume that Comcast is already considered a "must have" provider for all networks. So, they will argue that the deal won't increase their bargaining leverage. It will be interesting to see what an economic analysis shows in terms of that. Will the addition of all of those millions of Time Warner subscribers make it so the networks will be forced to reach a worse deal more quickly?

As well as the prevalence of government-issued franchises -- often exclusive -- to cable providers.

I generally do not have an issue with comcast except for price (Internet and cable). Only once in a while their alleged 24-hour maintenance lasts for 7-10 days and yet they don't say anything about and even deny there is an issue.

Comcast also has a partnership with Verizon and that makes it easy us to watch sporting events (espn) which my son does all of the time.

Seriously? We're monitoring language here now? Good luck with that, Bucc.

We've had Comcast here for the past decade or so. Generally agree with the impressions others have had -- service has been decent, price is outrageous. We do call them every six months or so to renegotiate our bill, usually get it cut 50 bucks or so until it goes back up. Pain in the ass, but we can't get dish service because of tall trees around my house block the satellite.

Could see it going through - consolidation in dying industries (ie. cable) is incredibly common .... I doubt many people in the next generation of kids will ever both with a cable subscription unless they're hardcore sports fans (and even that is increasingly available online now).

Are you saying that all future communication services will be handled by the likes of verizon and AT&T? Are we even close technically and practically to make that happen on a wide scale (ie, nearly every home) basis? Coverage? Reliability? Speed? Maybe we are, I don't know.

There's really not a huge need to divest that many subscribers. Comcast and TWC have zero overbuild areas. The only market in which both have a footprint is Kansas City, and here they both have separate markets. I think the offer to divest 3 million subscribers is mostly a gesture, with the added bonus of booting the least profitable and rattiest systems.
It's much easier now that most states have statewide video franchises. This is what made it possible for AT&T and Verizon to enter the overbuild markets so quickly. Most local franchise agreements are relics.
This is where I think they will have the tougher time convincing the DOJ this is kosher. The new Comcast will have about 30% market share of the pay TV market. They will be big enough to dictate to programmers more than ever. That would be a good thing, if Comcast passed programming savings on to the the customer -- which we know they will never do. Conversely, Comcast will be able to dictate the price for its own cable networks to 30 million subscribers, and then use that potentially inflated price to get higher carriage fees from other cable operators.

Of course this will also make Comcast the biggest gorilla in Internet service too. In a world without net neutrality, they can also dictate terms and give their content preferential treatment.

I think the deal goes through -- the DOJ will want other than Comcast cutting 3 million subscribers, and it wouldn't surprise me if they require Comcast to comply with net neutrality even if it's not the law -- but it's hard to see this getting done by their timeframe of by the end of 2014.

I'll be honest, until you mentioned it I never realized this even existed (been law in Georgia since 2008)

I was going to go off on the topic about how this is going to make those content negotiations even more contentious and give Comcast an even bigger stick to wield, which I think is really dangerous. But H_B and kcchief19 already hit that. I hate the idea of more consolidation when there should be more players in this market already because it keeps driving prices up and service just plugs along as the same level.

SI

I'm saying that the 'cable' side of things is on its way out - decline takes time, give it a decade or so and it'll be incredibly obvious.

This to me feels like newspapers during the 1990's ....

I haven't looked into this a bunch because I have doubts it will happen, but Seattle City Light is apparently upgrading to "smart meters" using a technology that could potentially be built as a city-wide high speed broadband network. Apparently Chattanooga is doing something like this and offering 1GB broadband for $70/month.

I'd do something like that in a heartbeat, but not sure that Comcast wouldn't find a way to try and throw a wrench in somewhere to prevent that from happening.

link

You are right to be concerned: ISP lobby has already won limits on public broadband in 20 states | Ars Technica

Seattle could have been a google city, but they didnt' want to turn over their preexisting infrastructure to google.

They're also plans to have a Gigabit Seattle internet provider in some neighborhoods, which will provide amazing speeds. Unfortuantely, I don't live in one of those neighborhoods.

Right now I believe I pay around $65/month plus tax for pretty bad broadband services. I can only imagine what this will do for the price in this area, but I will check back in on this thread in 2 years and I'm going to wager a guess that i am paying around 85-90 plus tax for high speed. Speeds that will undoubtedly not be any faster than the ones I have currently. I can't even get that higher speed TWC stuff that I think gstelmack and others have. The only other options are like DSL, but that blows speed wise. Satellite internet is not there yet, either. At least if you have TWC and Fios(or others) in your area you can leverage that into either switching every 2 years to at least save money the first year. Or you can call in and threaten to switch to the other and get a promo pricing. My friend does this all the time, but he also has cable from TWC. I honestly love the DirecTV Genie so much that there's probably no way I will ever consider switching from that. So unfortunately I guess I'm locked into market pricing on the TV from now on.

Oh yeah, and I bet data caps are right around the corner.

I guess I don't do anything that requires extraordinary speeds, so I wouldn't pay for that (bottlenecks would still occur in google's inefficient way of buffering youtube regardless if I have a bigger pipe or not). I would, however, pay for more reliability. I just have a feeling that is not going to get better anytime soon.

I honestly think this is for the best with TWC they have been going downhill quickly the past couple years...

I think you have to define what you mean by "cable" though. No company in America has sat on their (publicly funded) old technology lines longer than the telco companies...hell AT&T still is in many places.

But traditional Cable companies and Telecommunications companies (Verizon, AT&T) have more similarities than dissimilarities these days. The key difference is in how they handle the "last mile" to subscribers (which is what more people see, so its easy to assume its all like that). But despite that dissimilarity, there is nothing stopping a cable operator from continuing to extend their fiber to the subscriber besides cost/benefit/demand. Every catv company continues to expand & push fiber deeper & deeper to the home and it will eventually go there when those 3 factors align.

On the subject of the thread though...its less about Comcast getting bigger & more about not giving half of the cable industry back to John Malone. If you aren't familiar with him, and find this subject interesting, look him up.

I think it goes thru personally, as there is almost zero cable competition (just as there is almost zero telco competition...it telco vs cable, or telco vs dish, or dish vs cable) and there are operational & negotiation savings to such a large company when it comes to retrans with gigantic media companies (a big topic these days).

If it does not go thru, I think it will have more to do with Comcast owning NBC & setting market rate for retransmission fees than the idea of growing to 30M subscribers...which is still less subscribers than Netflix mind you.

But the inevitable is that Malone was thwarted from using the industry as his pet project...and to that end...I think its a good thing.

Agreed on both. The barrier to entry is infrastructure cost...not the paperwork of getting a video franchise. Google has had little trouble because they gazillions to waste on the infrastructure but most "normal" startups could never have a 20 yr ROI on such a massive investment.

Agree & disagree a little here.

There has been a lot of talk in the industry of trying to package low cost tiers (or even a la carte) but the problem is the content providers would not benefit from this as it would make them have to compete for subscriber dollars more than they do today. My sidebar opinion on a la carte (or very small tiers)...it would lead to serious media consolidation & what you see today could not exist as media companies would buy & sell assets until you no longer had a Disney, Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, etc. you'd just have a "Kids" programming conglomerate. Or instead of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC...you'd have a "News" conglomerate which would presumably be the winner of those 3. Though it may be inevitable, I don't think we'd like the outcome of that which I think would be a 3-5 year dwindling of content choice. In fairness, its hard to "blame" them for this as it goes against their business and they are not a bunch of non-profits looking to provide the public a compelling value.

But back to the topic....the real "market rate" that would be most concerning would be the idea that Comcast owns NBC and also has 1/3 of the pay TV households. That would mean Comcast could pay NBC (itself) whatever it wants that would be the market rate to measure against. That is the the biggest potential barrier to the deal going thru in my opinion.

Wont be handled alone by those companies but yes...AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TWC all have nationwide networks that consist of (collectively) thousands of 10 Gbps (many 100 Gbps) interconnects at various points. These are called backbones and all of these companies (and others) interconnect over each other, use each other for point L to point M, etc. with outstanding reliability.

So to put it another way....any provider could consolidate with all or any other provider (of similar technology such as telco or cable) with some minor interoperability issues to work thru (from a video standpoint), and very little issue from a network (or internet) standpoint.

Whats stopping that from happening is the reason the old AT&T was divested originally due to being a monopoly (and all that goes with it). But that world doesn't exist today even if AT&T were to purchase Verizon (or vise versa) though legislators would be highly skeptical & likely reject such a merger.

I think internet will look radically different in say 20 years. The need for wires everywhere for either network or power will die and so will these leaches.

Our grandkids will find it strange we actually had to plug stuff in everywhere.

Only to be replaced by other leaches. I do find it funny the hate people have for these companies and that people think things will really change if some other company gets in the game.

I completely agree a la carte programming would result in greater consolidation and a decrease in programming choices. I'm not sure it would consolidate based on genres, I think it would consolidate based on corporate owners -- the Fox Package, Disney Package, Viacomm, Discovery, Turner, etc. There's really not that much diversity of ownership anyway, but it would get worse. And instead of competing for premium space on channel lineups, the programmers would be competing against each other, which they don't want. I'm generally against a la carte programming because I figure if I'm going to pay $XX a month for cable, I may as well get 200 channels, 15 of which I watch regularly and others I sample occasionally than pay the same $XX a month for the 15 channels I want, which is absolutely what would happen.

I think we're in lockstep that it's a serious issue what impact Comcast having a third of pay TV households and owning dozens of cable channels. There will also be an issue with having so much of the Internet market share in the hands of one company too.

I think Comcast will end up shedding more than 3 million subs to make this work. The rumors from my TWC friends is that New York, the Carolinas, Texas and California are going Comcast for sure and everywhere else is a question mark. It makes sense, especially since Charter really wants the Midwest markets like Ohio & Wisconsin. Cox might be a player too. I doubt anyone wants poor Kansas City with Google in town.

Yep, agreed about the programming becoming The Fox (my word) "Portal", Disney "Portal", etc. I just think that you might also see them eventually spinoff content to each other to reduce the competition with each because, as you said, they REALLY do not want to compete channel for channel on their own merits.

And I also agree, you cannot get better value than the current model which is effectively a subsidized model for the "digital basic" tier. Though I'd like to see us have more options there to reduce the conventional digital basic. The rest of the tiers stand on their own really (premiums, sports, the handful of international a la cartes).

I understand the concern on internet, but honestly think the FCC will eventually update the Telecom act and will define "Internet Access Providers" as "common carriers" and the net neutrality rules can be enforced at that point. I actually think thats the right thing for consumers because even though nobody really does anything purposely to thwart OTT video providers (or other competitive services like internet voice), it doesn't mean they won't eventually see that as something to classify as 2nd priority traffic.

Yep, those would definitely be Comcast markets. And while I agree with those Midwest markets as being most likely to sell to Charter...wouldn't be shocked to see LA & possibly Pac NW (thrown in perhaps for a swap elsewhere).

Give me a reason to like a company that actively tries to screw its customers. And it will change. Google is proving it can be done. The disruption will come from companies with remarkably different principles than the entrenched leaches. The # of industries where you can actively screw your customers is shrinking every year and this is one of the next to go.

I'm not sure that you've ever said anything ever that I'd like to +1,000,000 more than this.

It was bound to happen eventually that we'd land on the same page. ;)

Some swaps wouldn't surprise me. Cable consolidation over the years has led to some strange bedfellows.

Coincidentally, TWC and Comcast thru mergers and acquisitions ended up in a 50/50 partnership in Kansas City. When they dissolved the partnership in 2007, Comcast had the choice of taking Houston or taking all of Kansas City and some other smaller systems. They announced they were taking Kansas City, and Comcast employees came over and picked out their offices, ordered furniture, you name it. Then at the 11th hour they changed their minds and took Houston. The result was TWC was suddenly stuck with a system it hadn't planned to run. Comcast kept the locations in KC they owned 100% interest in, which led to a split market.

KC will be reunited, which will absolutely be an overall win for consumers. But nobody knows who will operate this system for maybe 12-18 months.