A landslide of news and conjecture has obviously resulted from this weekend’s announcement by AT&T as it revealed an $85.4 billion deal to purchase Time Warner. Unless you’ve been incommunicado for the last few days, you’ve most likely already heard that AT&T and Time Warner Inc. released info on Saturday that they’ve entered into a definitive agreement under which AT&T will acquire Time Warner in a stock and cash transaction valued at $107.50 per share. The agreement has reportedly been approved unanimously by the boards of directors of both companies.
Of course, whether regulators allow the deal to go through remains to be seen and it’s probably a fair guess to say that if they do, there’d be some definitive rules and restrictions put into place as AT&T looks to marry its network power to Time Warner’s deep, deep pool of content. Politicians, pundits, presidential hopefuls and their reps lined up to express opinions, including Hillary Clinton (she thinks regulators need to scrutinize it carefully, according to her running mate Tim Kaine), and Donald Trump (who says he opposes it because it would concentrate too much power in too few hands).
In a call on Monday with investors and analysts, AT&T particularly stressed that the company thinks the deal could enhance their customers’ access to premium content on all their devices, especially when it comes to new choices for mobile and streaming video services and offering competition to the likes of cable operators.
“With a mobile network that covers more than 315 million people in the United States, the combined company will strive to become the first U.S. mobile provider to compete nationwide with cable companies in the provision of bundled mobile broadband and video,” AT&T says in a statement. “It will disrupt the traditional entertainment model and push the boundaries on mobile content availability for the benefit of customers. And it will deliver more innovation with new forms of original content built for mobile and social, which builds on Time Warner’s HBO Now and the upcoming launch of AT&T’s OTT offering DirecTV NOW.
In its Q3 report to investors, which it also released on Saturday, AT&T reports adding 323,000 DirecTV subscribers in the quarter, but its U-verse TV subscribers declined 326,000 as the company increasingly emphasized satellite sales. Total Entertainment Group broadband subscribers decreased 5,000 in the quarter, according to the company.
