After Comcast’s $30 billion
takeover of NBCUniversal and Verizon’s acquisitions of the Huffington Post and
Yahoo, AT&T agreed on October 22, 2016 to buy Time Warner for $85.4
billion. The ability to produce content and deliver it to millions of viewers
“with wireless phones, broadband subscriptions and satellite TV connections was
not lost on either board.[1]
At the time, AT&T sold “wireless service in a saturated market, while Time
Warner [was] a content company whose primary assets, networks like CNN and HBO,
[faced] tougher times in a cord-cutting world.”[2]
Although AT&T’s board could be accused of empire-building wherein bigger is
better (i.e., more powerful), the stabilizing impact of combining wireless
service and content could hardly be ignored in a business-environment so full
of change and uncertainty. In other words, with the traditional television
industry facing such dire threats to its revenue-structure due to the
proliferation of high-tech substitutes, having the wherewithal to formulate and
experiment with different distribution means and even content was at the time a
fitting strategy.
The full essay is at "AT&T Buys Time Warner."
1. Michael J. de la Merced, “AT&T Pledges $85 Billion To Acquire Time Warner,”
The New York Times, October 23, 2016.
2. Farhad Manjoo, “AT&T-Time
Warner Deal Is a Strike in the Dark,” The
New York Times, October 24, 2016.
