CEOs of AT&T, Time Warner to sell merger to skeptical Senate

“Tomorrow’s hearing is only about AT&T-Time Warner, but it could provide clues about Congress’s attitude toward telecom/media consolidation more generally”.

The IBEW union is supporting AT&T’s proposed merger with Time Warner.

US lawmakers grilled chief executives of AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc. about whether their proposed tie-up would benefit consumers and called for antitrust officials to closely scrutinize potential competitive harm from the deal.

“Together, AT&T and Time Warner will disrupt the entrenched pay-TV models”, said Stephenson, whose company serves 133 million U.S. wireless customers and 25 million video subscribers.

Both Time Warner Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Bewkes and Stephenson countered that their company’s successes depend on broad distribution. Time Warner produces content while AT&T distributes it, meaning that AT&T is not absorbing one of its direct competitors. Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, cited concerns that a merger of this size would concentrate too much power in the hands of one company and he anxious that it might affect freedom of the press.

Franken said he wanted to see the FCC review the merger due to their tougher standard. The wireless company is working on gaining regulatory approval for its Time Warner deal.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is quite optimistic about video, and thinks you’ll be watching it nine hours a day, eventually. “You have every reason to do this if you could”. “They said on the record that Time Warner wouldn’t discriminate where the content went”.

“The early phase is not mobile-oriented”, said McAdam, adding that he expects to have a better sense of the timeline for Verizon’s 5G rollout by the middle of 2017. And Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, who’s been among the most vocal opponents of several big mergers over the past years, including the Comcast-NBC Universal merger, pressed Stephenson on whether today’s net neutrality rules would be sufficient to protect consumers.

The panel’s chairman, Sen. The merger “eliminates no competitor”, he said – a classic vertical merger.

This may not result in any changes in how the wireless carriers operate, however, as agency leaders appointed by Donald Trump, the incoming president, are expected to look more favorably on such practices.

The $108.7 billion acquisition would join America’s largest pay TV provider with a media and entertainment company that has a massive catalog of movies and TV shows. “We now view the likelihood of AT&T/Time Warner getting approved as a 70/30 proposition based on a recent expert discussion we held”.

It is the Justice Department that will ultimately decide whether to approve the deal, and senators will have no direct influence on that decision, though they are well positioned to publicly raise concerns. Theirs would be a “vertical merger”. “I think we’re all going to be kind of in a push to bring that forward as much as possible”.

What about Trump’s avowed opposition?

Meanwhile, for those of us who still enjoy our TV the old-fashioned way, on our couch, cold beverage in one hand and remote in the other, there is a lot to be said for having a company that can afford to continue to offer us that choice. “I’ve heard rumors he’s not happy with CNN, so that might have come into it”. Bewkes and Stephenson about their commitment to journalistic independence for the news network involved in the transaction, CNN.

Stephenson made his comments at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference, which was also webcast.