Time Warner Cable plugs into consolidation war

TIME WARNER CABLE PLUGS INTO CONSOLIDATION WAR
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: Aline van Duyn]
Although Time Warner Cable is the second-biggest US cable operator with over 13 million television subscribers (Comcast is number one with 24 million) at some point analysts anticipate the company will need to expand. Cable companies already offer many of their TV subscribers high-speed Internet access. Increasingly, they are selling a third service, telephone access, and mobile phone connections could follow. The popularity of such bundles, dubbed triple play, is leading telecom rivals like AT&T and Verizon to step up investment in television. One benefit of scale is the ability to negotiate better terms for television content. For most cable companies, one of the biggest factors putting pressure on margins has been rising programming costs, and containing those is crucial. Consolidation in the cable business is widely regarded as likely to start next year.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/bf05787a-cda2-11db-839d-000b5df10621.html
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