The news today of a potential merger between two giants in the media industry: AT&T and Time Warner brought with it both a wave of enthusiasm and skepticism in the financial markets and the multimedia/telecommunications industry. The enthusiasm was demonstrated on Wall Street, where Time Warner stock trading surged, with their stock price up around 13% at one point in today’s activity.
The skepticism comes on the part of some consumer groups who are concerned about what this merger might mean for costs of internet access, cellular phone and data plans, and satellite television services (AT&T merged with Direct TV previously). There is also some legitimate cause for regulators to reject this deal, so there is some caution in the industry that this merger may eventually come apart.
The proposed deal includes Time Warner’s film division and cable television division which includes channels such as TBS, TNT, CNN, as well as the crown jewel of premium cable networks, HBO. The deal is valued, according to sources, at $300 billion. It would be the largest merger in the media industry since Comcast completed the acquisition of NBC/Universal in 2011.
This trend would continue what I have deemed in other mergers as the “big getting bigger” scenario. Time Warner is a huge company with many different divisions and huge market presence in media of all forms. AT&T has a market cap of $233 billion and provides cellular phone, internet, telecommunications, and satellite television services to millions of consumers. The combined entity would be a goliath capable of competing with Comcast/Universal, which I maintain is one of the goals of this move today.
The trend of the average consumer looking to cut out their cable television service, or “cord cutting” as it is known, is something I have written about in the past, and it is an increasing trend. This trend is damaging the cable television providers and the cable networks from making revenue gains. This has particularly impacted Time Warner’s cable services division, and made this potential merger a way to partner with a larger company to expand their reach.
The trend toward streaming content is also a driving factor in this proposed merger, as AT&T has been actively pursuing the development of their own streaming content service which would be offered via the Direct TV platform. The combination with Time Warner would provide AT&T with more advantageous content streaming negotiations because they would be better positioned to control the content from TBS, TNT, CNN, and most importantly, HBO.
HBO has top rated content that is sought after by competing streaming services and cable and telco providers. This would put AT&T in the proverbial driver’s seat of those negotiations, but is the same reason why regulatory boards will have issues with this deal.
The Wall Street Journal reported that regulators have some regrets over the Comcast merger with NBC/Universal which they do not want to have repeated by this potential media industry transaction. The Time Warner properties in the cable network division also have exclusive rights (or partial exclusive rights) to sports content such as the NCAA Tournament in college basketball, NBA basketball games both regular season and playoffs, and Major League baseball both regular season and playoff games. This made the deal more attractive for AT&T because of the demand for live sports programming, but it will also make the regulatory scrutiny that much more heightened because that content is meant to be seen by everyone and not meant to be restricted to only certain providers.
This proposed merger, should it gain approval, would give AT&T a huge advantage in providing streaming content for their cellular phones and their new service with Direct TV customers. It would provide Time Warner with more outlets for their content and more consumers in parts of the country which they could not reach with their traditional cable television services. It would offset the loss of cable television consumers through the streaming rights agreements for their content that they will gain through millions of AT&T customers.
However, in the end, this media giant would have more control over more content and that should give both the industry and the consumer cause for concern. This merger should be stopped because it will provide too much control to one corporation, we saw what happened with Comcast and NBC, we cannot afford to let that happen again.
(background information and stats courtesy of CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and CBS News)