Applications will be filed “expeditiously” on cable system...
Applications will be filed “expeditiously” on cable system divestitures among Charter Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, executives for those companies told acting FCC General Counsel Jonathan Sallet and another staffer in his office. The companies asked the commission to…
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consider those coming applications contemporaneously with Comcast’s applications to buy Time Warner Cable, said a filing posted Thursday in docket 14-57 (http://bit.ly/1miNoSp). The companies agreed this week (CD April 29 p4) to system deals that will expand Charter and reduce the size of Comcast/Time Warner Cable, which they noted to the FCC will mean the combined company would have less than 30 percent of U.S. pay-TV subscribers as previously promised to the agency. It’s hard to suggest that Comcast’s plan to divest 3.9 million subscribers doesn’t advance the company’s Time Warner Cable acquisition case by alleviating claimed competitive concerns, said Free State Foundation President Randy May. The end result is that Comcast’s total number of subscribers, post-acquisition, will be less than 30 percent of all pay-TV subscribers, he said in a blog post Thursday (http://bit.ly/1lElSMz). It’s a bit “out of sorts” to use the occasion of the announcement “as another opportunity to engage in overheated anti-merger rhetoric,” he said. “It would seem more fitting to acknowledge that such subscriber divestitures at least lessen professed concerns about concentration.” The competitive impact of the proposed combination relative to the broad broadband market should be the primary focus of the acquisition review, he said.