Skies darken over Comcast merger

Comcast’s $45 billion bid to buy Time Warner Cable increasingly appears in peril, as public sentiment and other considerations before federal regulators threaten to torpedo the blockbuster deal.

The merger of the nation’s two biggest cable companies was once seen as inevitable, but growing public sentiment against the deal is causing many analysts to downgrade the odds that it goes through, with some already predicting it flat-out won’t happen. Among them is Craig Moffett, an industry analyst whose firm recently lowered its odds that the deal would be approved. “We wanted to clearly signal that there was no ambiguity about which way the wind was blowing,” Moffett said. “The odds were going down instead of up.” Moffett now gives the merger a 70 percent chance of happening. Richard Greenfield, another industry analyst, gives it just a 30 percent chance of meeting regulators’ muster, largely based on a number of issues going on at the Federal Communications Commission.