“Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after regulators planned to oppose the deal,” Alex Sherman reports for Bloomberg. “Comcast is planning to make a final decision on its plans Thursday, and an announcement on the deal’s fate may come as soon as Friday, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information.”
“This week, U.S. Federal Communications Commission staff joined lawyers at the Justice Department in opposing the planned transaction,” Sherman reports. “The last time the FCC staff proposed sending a merger to a hearing was over AT&T Inc.’s bid to buy T-Mobile USA Inc. in 2011, prompting the companies to drop the deal.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Good.
As we wrote on Monday: “The U.S. needs more competition in the broadband Internet and cable television markets, not less.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bill” for the heads up.]
Related article:
U.S. DOJ likely to block Comcast’s bid to buy Time Warner Cable – April 20, 2015
hallelujah
apparently comcast was having difficulties finding enough incompetent and rude customer service reps to replace everyone at Time Warner
O_O You mean Comcast CSRs make Time-Warner’s look good?? That’s… unsettling.
——RM
If those are the qualifications, no need to replace them.
Good! Comcast is the evil beast.
I hope the deal is off so TWC can collaborate on future Apple media projects without interference from Comcast.
great .. Great .. & GREAT
This just in from Gaagle earnings statement per AP: “It marked the sixth consecutive quarter that Google’s earnings have fallen below the analysts’ targets that shape investors’ expectations.” GOOG is UP $20 in after market trading. What is wrong here folks?
i wish i knew. btw, nice ribbon.
Definitely earned.
Check out Amazon too. Up 15% with negative EPS. Again.
Also check out Amazon’s decreasing revenue growth. They grew earnings 15.1 percent in the March quarter and 14.62 percent in the December quarter, which is much lower growth than in the past. In fact, the last time they had two quarters of sub twenty percent top-line growth was in March and June 2009.
I hope this doesn’t foretell issues with the broader economy… although they might be reaching “law of large numbers” and/or are experiencing greater competion.
Now if only local competition was more wide spread.
I hope this doesn’t put an end to all the speed upgrades Time Warner’s been doing. I’m loving the hell out of my 300Mb/s upgrade, which was free. Over the last couple of years they bumped me up to 100, then 300Mb/s for no additional cost. Then all this Comcast talk started.
Oh well. Perhaps they will both learn that we are indeed customers and not just cows to milk cash out of or assets to be rented to content providers.
I’ve seen nothing like your 300MB/s upgrade. But I’m going to guess you’re talking about a professional/business account.
One of the nasty tricks TWC has attempted to play in various markets is downloaded data caps. They have been caught charging 10x markup on downloads beyond their set caps. That’s called ABUSE and GOUGING. They are parasites sucking on their customers.
From last November:
Time Warner Cable insists you’ll love data caps, no matter how often you say ‘no’
👿 😈 👿
I have residential service and got 300mb free upgrade with Time Warner here in Austin as well. But that’s only because Google fiber arrived here. AT&T and TWC have both been scrambling the past 12 months to improve their service to compete with Google.
Ah, the joys of competition! That’s how capitalism works.
Good, now the DoJ should break up CONcast by undoing the NBC/Universal Takeover.
This action is also widely seen as signaling the end of AT&T’s attempt to buy DirectTV.
Funny how these companies have all the money in the world to buy other companies but cannot afford to improve service.
AT&T sounded very confident the deal was going through during yesterday’s call. They are also advertising DirectTV bundles on their website:
http://www.att.com/shop/tv/directv.html
150 channels for $25 and 225 channels including NFL package for $35 looks pretty compelling. Plus, they are rolling-out 1 gigabit per second speeds into 10 U.S. cities.
Apple is going to have a very difficult time competing if they are only offering 20 channels for $20-$30.
Apple should NOT be doing preset bundles at all! The only seriously innovative move Apple could make is 100% à la carte choices provided to users. Unless that happens, I have zero interest. Bundles have been an abusive SCAM since day 1 and will always remain so.
TWC is not a competitive company. I visit two homes – one in northern california with comcast x1 and one in souther california with TWC. Compared with TWC, Comcast rocks! (never thought i would say that) and they are actually innovating and the newest DVRs with their system are actually user friendly and useful. Sure, the price is high, but at least they deliver – the crummy cable companies charge just as much. We need some totally new dynamic but it isn’t on the horizon due to all the content contracts being tied up in knots by the cable companies.
There are several reasons why Time Warner Cable was voted Worst In The Nation by its customers. I’ve pointed out a few further reasons over at one of my blogs. They’re easily the most despicable company I’ve personally encountered. 😛
I’ve never had cable tv service from TWC so I can’t speak to that, but so far I’m happy with the 50mbs for $34.99/month internet that I switched to this January. In my area it was this or AT&crap which I was paying $61/month for 18mbs and barely ever getting 9mbs if that most of the time, plus my bill was set to go $66/month this January. I patiently waited 3yrs for AT&crap to boost their internet speeds in my area and every time I called them I got ‘sorry sir we don’t know if you’ll ever get faster internet in your area’ so it was time to say ‘signora’ AT&crap.
Locally, TWC is charging $55 per month for ’30 mbs’. What you really get depends upon the time of day (local Internet rush hours) and whether TWC is messing around with their servers (of which they neglect to tell even their tech support about, seeing as they don’t give a rat’s). The costs for Verizon FIOS locally are even worse AND Verizon locally has just a bad a reputation for customer abuse as TWC. Two rotten peas in a pod.
YAY!!!
…I’m waiting for Friday’s announcement from Comcast before I believe it.
IF this is real, the next logical and pro-capitalism step is to either:
1) BREAK UP worst-in-class Comcast and Time Warner Cable.
2) Destroy the idiotic cable monopoly system within the entire USA. It never should have been allowed in the first place. This will require making the cables public property, available for a variety of companies to use for Internet access, TV, VOIP, etc. Allowing this fundamental public asset to be owned by monopoly companies was an idiotic idea right from the start and should never have been allowed.
3) With cable having be made public property, collect user fees from the participating companies in order to EXTEND and EXPAND both cable and bandwidth across the entire nation.
NOTE: The cable expansion effort was KILLED specifically by nearly all the current monopolistic cable companies, despite the fact that they were all provided with funds specifically designated for expanding their cable systems. The US government has the right and incentive to SUE these companies for breach of contract. It’s time we got on their ass and FORCED them to do their job instead of rolling over and playing dead.
😡 🙄 😡
[Can you tell this subject is one of my obsessions? Sorry to hog the page.]
And it’s official. One of the reasons stated was because the government felt the merger might of thwarted newer online/on demand competition.
I was very pleased to read about it this morning. Somewhere or other today (probably at the Guardian) I outlined what the next steps should be, including:
– Break up TWC and Comcast, selling off the pieces to customer respecting companies.
– Break up the idiotic cable franchise system of yore, make the cable public and allow competition between companies for access to customers. That will effectively kill of the monopolies and the subsequent bad monopolist attitude toward customers and expanding the cable system as well as superior bandwidth.
I forgot what else. Past my bed time. 😉