Consumer will ‘win’ in this deal
President Trump has been screaming “fake news” and trying to break media conglomerates since he took office, but yesterday, the free press scored a “yuge” win as a federal judge approved a blockbuster merger of telecommunications titan AT&T and media giant Time Warner.
Trump’s Department of Justice tried with all its might to thwart the $85 billion deal to no avail, as the judge approved a merger that allows AT&T, which owns DirectTV, to absorb Time Warner, owner of CNN, HBO and Warner Bros. The DOJ’s beef that customers would be the loser fell on deaf ears as the path was cleared for one corporate behemoth to control the likes of “Game of Thrones,” Anderson Cooper and even more sports programming.
“Overall, the consumer is going to win,” said David Gerzof Richard, CEO of BIGfish PR, a Boston tech firm. “With media and telecom converging more and more, having another large player in the space that’s competing with the likes of Google and Netflix, that’s probably a good thing.”
The merger puts AT&T and Time Warner in the same arena as the few companies that already provide bandwidth and content, added Gerzof Richard, who is also a professor of communications studies at Emerson College.
“It’s not creating this ginormous behemoth that’s going to take over everything,” Gerzof Richard said last night. “It’s creating a company that is going to put companies like Google and Netflix in check.”
More programming, he added, will likely come out of the deal.
The merger combines the news and entertainment producing Time Warner with a company that delivers it to consumers.
The merged company, executives said, would be better able to compete at a time when people spend more time watching videos on phones and tablets than on TV. Traditional TV’s foothold in the market is plummeting, and this deal signals that some of the industry’s biggest players are ready for change.
Trump, who despises CNN, had threatened to kill the deal when it first surfaced in October 2016, when he was a presidential candidate. Trump later said the merger was “not good for the country,” believing it could increase pay-TV prices.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon summarily declared that to be “fake news,” ruling that the government failed to prove the merger would lead to higher prices.
AT&T has said it needed Time Warner to compete with Amazon, Netflix and Google in streaming TV and the company promised to give consumers more choices. This deal takes a massive step toward that goal.
Gerzof Richard said he believes the merger will lead to greater diversity in programming and in how the programming is delivered to homes and devices. More competition, he added, could keep costs down.
“My hope is that by having another competition in the space that it keeps prices down,” Gerzof Richard said. “I believe that this is going to be a good thing.”