Once upon a time, it was the mission of a company to get big, get money, and then diversify. A television company, a publishing house, production studios, an online services provider… once upon a time, Time Warner did everything under the sun and spread its tendrils wide in a bid to make money everywhere doing everything. Now the Time Warner octopus is shedding its limbs, offering up delicious business calamari to hungry suitors. The merger between Comcast and Time Warner might not have worked, but there’s a new suitor. Charter is attempting to buy Time Warner Cable for $56 billion dollars.
“It’s a smaller company so some of the concerns that were raised about potential abuses of a larger company don’t pertain here,” said Time Warner Chief Executive Rob Marcus. “It is also the case that we don’t have any of the other complications that arose out of Comcast being a vertically integrated media company with a broadcast network, a movie studio, a national cable network,” he said.
Turns out fourth time is the charm for Charter, which has tried repeatedly to purchase or take over Time Warner Cable. Thanks to the intervention of the federal government scuttling the merger with Comcast, it just might happen for the nation’s soon-to-be-third-largest cable company, behind Comcast and the proposed AT&T/DirecTV merger.
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