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Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Cable Consolidation Confirmed For Charter

Three weeks ago, I mentioned in my blog that Charter Cable was kicking the tires on Bright House Networks.  Today it has been confirmed that Charter will acquire Bright House with a combined subscriber base exceeding 7 million homes.  Bright House parent, Advance-Newhouse will own about 25%, and Liberty about 25% of the new MPVD.

Most interestingly, this acquisition is contingent on the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable.  Should that not happen, this deal could likely be kaput.  Bright House has benefited from their current relationship with Time Warner through a programming partnership that enables them to get the same license fee rates as TWC.  That programming deal would likely expire when or if the Comcast deal is approved.  Combining with Charter post approval would create a larger entity that could likely retain those better licensing terms.

So just to count all the cable acquisition deals in front of the FCC to date, we have Comcast and Time Warner Cable, AT&T and DirecTV, and now Charter and Bright House.  Three and counting...one can only wonder who the next likely target will be.