Industry Shifts May Aid Comcast in Takeover Bid

[Commentary] Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable comes at a moment of seismic change in the television industry, with consumers increasingly cutting their cable cords and instead streaming their favorite shows via the Internet through services like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and Hulu. This shifting landscape may aid Comcast as it seeks to persuade government officials -- and deploy its prodigious army of lobbyists -- to win approval for its $45 billion takeover.

A merged Comcast and Time Warner Cable would have nearly twice as many high-speed Internet subscribers as the next largest company and would control roughly 38 percent of the high-speed Internet market, according to figures compiled by the Leichtman Research Group. The combined companies would account for nearly 32 million broadband customers, compared with 16 million for AT&T and nine million for Verizon. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler once served as the leader of the cable industry’s chief lobbying group. And the current director of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, William J. Baer, represented NBCUniversal during the Comcast deal as a lawyer in private practice. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on whether Baer’s work for NBC would affect his ability to oversee the investigation of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable transaction. In January, well before the announcement of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, Baer said that any transactions involving telecommunications companies, including wireless phone companies or cable providers, would be closely scrutinized by the antitrust division.