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Could Charter and Time Warner Cable merge?

S

ShawnHill1

If Liberty Media chairman John Malone, whose company owns 27 percent of Charter Communications, gets his way, it could happen in the near-future, according to Bloomberg.com. They also report that Charter may also go after Cablevision Systems Corp.

However, a problem does arise...TWC is valued at $31.5 billion, while Charter is worth $12.5 billion. Malone would have to borrow heavily just to gain enough money to buy-out TWC.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-...os-for-time-warner-cable-deal.html?cmpid=yhoo
 
If they do I will probably weep. Charter's managed to dodge some of the worst of the carriage controversies (30 years in my town through various companies...channels have never been dumped at the end of deals) and their Internet and cable is downright dependable for me. Meanwhile in the next towns over where my co-workers live which have TWC, I hear nothing but complaints and email bouncing is a regular occurrence, and I've told in past controversies of channel dumps like NFL Network after taking over other companies until Time Warner came to agreement with them. Hopefully the deal is Malone taking control of TWC, throwing out their inept management and nothing changes for Charter customers.
 
I hope not. Charter is turning off analog cable in the Asheville area. If that happened, it would be a major inconvenience for me.

Not to mention a big expense.

Half the time when two shows are on at once that I want to tape, I'm not even aware of it. The TiVo I got for DTV only works with cable or satellite, so I couldn't use it for over-the-air and had to manually make sure the TVs hooked up to an antenna were on the channel for any show I wanted to tape. And one of those TVs now has a broken VCR. The good news is that because it works for digital, it will tape two analog channels at once. Not so for digital. For digital, I would have to manually check every show I wanted to tape and if it got bumped, I'd have to add it on a second TiVo. Which would cost money. But given the way the other VCR hooked up to cable is behaving, I may have to do that anyway. And of course, if I kept that VCR, no more having it select the channels. I would always have to make sure the TV was on the channel I wanted to tape.

FOUR shows at once, baby!!!!
 
I know for us in Southern California, a Charter-TWC union would have a near-complete grip on the cable housesholds in the region. TWC, by itself, already controls most of Los Angeles County, while Charter has some of the larger in-county suburbs like Long Beach, Pasadena, Burbank, and I believe Glendale. I can't speak for Charter, but I live in a TWC service area (but I'm a DirecTV subscriber)...it looks like TWC will be phasing-out analog cable completely by year's end, and will start issuing out DTA recievers. A couple years ago, they removed all of the basic cable networks, just left only the locals and a few other lifeline channels (public access, WGN America, and a couple others).

I like DirecTV, but I like the idea that at least with TWC, there's no contract you get stuck under for two years. However, their equipment leases are a lot more costly than DirecTV's; with DTV, not counting my programming package, I'm currently paying $17 for my whole-home HD DVR service (and that's after the $6 discount I get for my primary TV)...TWC's whole-home service is $32 a month (just for the main reciever), plus whatever you pay in programming. If you wanted to add another Whole-home box, that's an additional $32 a month, while a regular HD DVR box is just $10 extra per month.

Personally, you're probably better off buying a Tivo and get a CableCARD from the cable provider (which is about $2-3 a month, depending on the provider). Yeah, there's the monthly service fee to Tivo and you'll access to On Demand and pay-per-view with a CableCARD, but at least the Tivos, you could use the Netflix and Hulu apps (plus YouTube) to make up for it.
 
Were that to happen, I suspect the Charter system in the Worcester, Massachusetts area (as well as a few existing Time-Warner Cable systems in the outer portions of the Boston market) may get spun-off to Comcast, which has most of the cable systems within the Boston ADI.
 
Time Warner doesn't seem interested in a Charter merger. We would be more likely to see Charter acquire some other companies first, perhaps Cox, CableOne, Mediacom, or Cablevision.
 
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