Brittany Robertson

Investors like the consistent reports that Charter Communications is prowling for acquisition targets, especially now that it’s backed by Liberty Media which recently paid $2.6B for a 27% stake in the cable operator. But some are less sure than they were late last week that Time Warner Cable will be a target. Shares in the No. 2. cable company slid 2.5% to $101.29 today. That’s just a slight retreat after Friday’s 8.3% jump to a 52-week high of $104.13, which followed a CNBC report that Charter has its eye on a transformational deal with Time Warner Cable. Liberty Media CEO Gregg Maffei met with TWC chief Glenn Britt recently to talk about the benefits of of a merger of equals, CNBC’s David Faber reported. Although there was no offer, Faber said that TWC decided to “re-engage with longtime advisor Morgan Stanley and hire an outside PR firm in case it needed to defend against a more public onslaught.” Investors don’t rule out the possibility that Charter, which has a market value of $11.9B, will make a bold effort to combine with TWC, valued at $29.5B. But many believe Charter probably would start off looking for smaller targets such as Cox, Mediacom, or Suddenlink. That was also a recurring theme in conversations at last week’s annual Cable Show in D.C. Charter was +1% today to $117.72 after its 5.6% bump on Friday. Most cable companies “are trading ... Read More »

It’s not the lead of the NY Times‘ report on Time Warner Cable and other cable and satellite distributors’ tactics to make it difficult for web rivals — most notably Intel’s venure — to enter the industry. But it could be one of the most interesting wrinkles in the story, which picked up steam this week at The Cable Show in Washington DC. That’s where Time Warner Cable boss Glenn Britt suggested during a Q&A that his company designed carriage deals with language that could prevent alternate programmers from getting access to the same content. “We actually have roughly 300 different deals for different networks and I hesitate to make any generalizations”, Britt said Tuesday. “We may well have ones that have that prohibition. We have other ones that probably, say, if you go over-the-top then we get those same rights. And all the variations on that you can imagine. This is not a cookie-cutter kind of business”. Time Warner Cable yesterday defended itself against the anticompetitive claims being bandied about since then, saying in part in a statement: “The amount and scope of exclusivity and windowing in Time Warner Cable’s arrangements with programmers pales by comparison to that found between other players in the entertainment ecosystem”. Stay tuned on this one.