Report: Justice Wants Turner or DirecTV Sale as Condition for AT&T-Time Warner Approval

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osu1991

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Report: Justice Wants Turner or DirecTV Sale as Condition for AT&T-Time Warner Approval | Multichannel

The path to an AT&T-Time Warner merger got even murkier Wednesday after The New York Times reported that the U.S. Department of Justice would seek a divestiture of either Turner Broadcasting or DirecTV as a condition for its approval of a deal.

The Times, citing sources familiar with the companies, said the DOJ has asked that AT&T sell either Turner Broadcasting – Time Warner's group of cable channels that includes CNN or DirecTV, the satellite TV giant that AT&T purchased in 2015.
 
This is quite a surprise. I wonder which path they will take.
 
or they sell the Turner brand to CBS, Viacom, Sinclair Broadcasting Group or Disney.
I'm not so sure. Turner consists of real network and content assets while DTV is mearly a retransmitter service owning none of the content and whose business is already in free fall. The real question is, who'd buy it?
 
I never had feelings good or bad about AT&T until they bought Directv.
Having to deal with the current csr‘s has become very painful. I wish they would sell Directv!
 
This makes no sense at all.

DirecTV is a content deliverer. T-W is a content maker. By definition content is not fungible and thus an automatic monopoly (if you want TBS, only T-W has TBS, its is not the same as most products, which are fungible and thus have many competitors). So AT&T owns the old Turner channels? And? It is going to charge DISH, cable and internet high prices for it, and make DirecTV really inexpensive? Right? Well, Comcast, also a content deliverer bouight NBC, et al, did they do that? No.

The fix is simple. The same "we will play fair" agreement that Comcast made when it bought Universal (NBC).

If AT&T wants to fight, it will win.
 
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