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

[osu1991]

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.

 

[mdonnelly]

My, my! Highly unusual for DoJ under a Republican administration to seek divestiture as a merger approval condition.

2 ways of reading Trump’s objections to the AT&T/Time Warner merger

 

[Voyager6]

My, my! Highly unusual for DoJ under a Republican administration to seek divestiture as a merger approval condition.

2 ways of reading Trump’s objections to the AT&T/Time Warner merger

From that article:

A former high-ranking federal antitrust official I spoke to said he found it surprising that a Republican administration would raise these objections but also that the objections themselves were not necessarily unreasonable.

 

[raoul5788]

Let's be sure to keep politics in the pit and not here. Thanks!

 

[navychop]

This is quite a surprise. I wonder which path they will take.

 

[Juan]

Let's be sure to keep politics in the pit and not here. Thanks!

No worries..we have a thread started

 

[raoul5788]

No worries..we have a thread started

Of course you do!

 

[Willh699]

This is quite a surprise. I wonder which path they will take.

they will either kill the merger and just stay the way it is now or they sell the Turner brand to CBS, Viacom, Sinclair Broadcasting Group or Disney.

 

[Radioguy41]

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?

 

[larry55]

I wish they sell Directv and move on.

 

[navychop]

To who?

 

[EchostarFan]

My suggestion: Kill the merger, divorce both Ma Bell and DirecTV, then we feel the (bits of) joy.

 

[primestar31]

To who?

Charlie of course... LOL

 

[EchostarFan]

Charlie of course... LOL

We knew what went wrong when DirecTV was going to be sold to Charlie back in '02.....

 

[Jimbo]

We knew what went wrong when DirecTV was going to be sold to Charlie back in '02.....

I would move to OTA only if that ever happened....

 

[navychop]

I have at times found crow to be nutritious, if not delicious.

 

[primestar31]

I have at times found crow to be nutritious, if not delicious.

Nevermore!

Ok, close enough...

 

[rad]

AT&T gets their lawyers out and takes DOJ to court.

 

[tigerfan33]

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!

 

[SamCdbs]

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.