[PR]: AT&T Offers to Buy Time Warner Inc. for $84.5 billion
AT&T known for being one of the biggest phone service providers ever, and now the owner of DIRECTV, announced a few weeks ago that is has offered Time Warner Inc. an $84.5 billion dollar buyout. Time Warner the company that owns HBO, CNN, and Warner Bros., which owns franchises like Batman and Harry Potter. Not to be confused with Time Warner Cable, the two companies split back in 2009.
The senate hasn’t helped with all of the confusion surrounding the big merger by summoning the former CEO of Time Warner Cable, Rob Marcus, to a meeting regarding the merge of AT&T and Time Warner Inc. The size of the two companies, and all of the confusion over Time Warner Inc. and Time Warner Cable has created a lot of buzz in itself. Many people like New York Times, Jim Stewart think that the merge has a good chance of going through, because the companies are involved in separate markets and are not competing with each other.
There has been a lot of skepticism over the merge that AT&T has a long road to ahead of them after their jump into the cable market. So this situation is a little different than buying DIRECTV, where there’s already a solid customer base, signed up and paying for satellite services. If this merger is to go through AT&T will say what happens to programming on channels like CNN, NBC, and HBO. To assure consumers and Wall Street that the deal is going to be ok the current CEO of Time Warner, Jeffrey Bewkes, says he is staying on afterwards to make sure the merge goes smoothly.
By the looks of it, this has been a PR nightmare, both CEOs of AT&T and Time Warner have been back and forth from news outlet to news outlet and answering calls from papers trying to get the whole mess figured out, all caused by the confusion to the skeptics. It looks like New York Times has the most opinions to share about the big buyout, the list of articles is quite long. To top it all of there’s no news on any new senate meeting over the deal after their big mess up.
On the other hand many fans of HBO are either excited or afraid of what this merge means for the programming that they love. The good is that AT&T could make HBO more like Netflix. If you have AT&T as a cell phone service this could mean watching HBO on your devices, and only paying once, through AT&T, or possibly not paying at all. What we know for sure is HBO certainly isn’t talking about it.
Whether this merge is good or bad, going to get approved by senate or not, AT&T has made a big splash, and a lot of appearances in the media lately, and even after all of this is over with will likely remain in the news regarding the way the decision turns out.
