Mike Farrell

Time Warner shareholders approved the pending $108.7 billion merger with AT&T on Feb 15, putting the mega-deal on a path for a year-end 2017 close. Time Warner said about 78% of its outstanding shares voted in favor of the deal, with the rest not casting a vote. Of the shares that were voted, 99% were in favor of the transaction.

Credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service predicts that mergers & acquisitions activity among telecommunication companies will continue as the industry seeks to offset low revenue potential and intensifying competition with deals. Already the sector has seen AT&T announce a $108.7 billion deal with Time Warner in October and Century Link make a $34 billion offer for Level 3 Communications.

Moody’s sees more deals ahead. “Market saturation and tough competition have produced a stagnant US telecom market,” Moody’s said in its report. “Yet regulators remain unlikely to approve consolidation within the traditional telecom sector, especially for large incumbents, so they must look elsewhere for growth.” Moody’s predicts that in the wake of those deals, Verizon Communications will likely accelerate its 5G mobile video strategy either through large scale M&A or partnerships.

Cable One said it has agreed to purchase mid-sized cable operator NewWave Communications from private equity group GTCR for $735 million in cash. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2017. Buying NewWave, headquartered in Sikeston (MO), will add about 214,000 residential primary service units (PSUs, a measure of video, voice and broadband customers) in Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas to Cable One. Phoenix (AZ)-based Cable One had 315,589 residential video customers, 466,668 residential broadband customers and 100,510 residential telephony customers at the end of the third quarter.

Tiny public utility Conway Corp., is the latest company to enter the ultra high-speed Internet arena, with plans to unveil a 1-Gigabit per second broadband service in Conway (AR) in December. Conway Corp. started operating the city-owned utility system 85 years ago. The company provides electric, water, wastewater, cable, Internet, telephone and security services within the Conway city limits. Conway Corp. plans to price the service at $94.95 per month.

Conway Corp. began offering broadband in 1997, after it completed construction on a city-wide fiber-coax network, a two-year project that cost $5.6 million. When the network went live, Conway Corp. said, it became the third company in the country and fifth in the world to offer high-speed, broadband cable Internet service.

Comcast could have its eye on as much as 30 Megahertz of wireless licenses in the upcoming federal incentive spectrum auctions, based on a line item buried in its third quarter financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In its most recent 10-Q filing with the SEC, Comcast revealed it made a $1.8 billion deposit, that many analysts believe point to its further participation in the incentive auction. The item was under the heading “Investment Activities” in the 10-Q.

While the company offered no explanation in the document just what that deposit was for, investors noted the timing and the requirement that bidders in the formal auction submit a deposit before being allowed to bid. Deposits were due July 1, meaning that they would show up in Q2 or Q3 reports. Based on the size of the deposit, several analysts determined that Comcast could bid for roughly 30 Megahertz of wireless spectrum. That is higher than previous estimates that Comcast would bid for between 10 MHz and 20 MHz of spectrum. AT&T and T-Mobile also made deposits $2.4 billion and $2.2 billion, respectively, which would make them eligible to bid on about 40 MHz each. Dish Network, which already owns about 40 MHz of mid-band spectrum, hasn’t reported yet.

Comcast said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it now expects to gain the necessary regulatory approvals for unionist acquisition of Time warner Cable in early 2015.

That is a few months later than the company rather optimistically expected when it announced the deal in February.

The battle for sports superiority in the Los Angeles area continues as Time Warner Cable piled on additional feeds of the Pac-12 Network to customers in the area.

Time Warner Cable added five additional Pac-12 feeds several days prior to the first scheduled college-football contest on the network.

The five additional channels are part of the original deal the cable operator made for the main feed of the Pac-12 channel in conference states: California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. Pac-12 charges carriage fees of about 80 cents per subscriber per month in conference states, according to several published reports. The remaining feeds are available for “pennies,” sources familiar with the matter said.

Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts told analysts that he believes AT&T’s pending deal to acquire DirecTV is a “powerful combination,” adding that the $67 billion merger validates the idea that the market is changing rapidly.

Roberts said the two companies are “part of the reason we have lost video subs,” over the past six years. “And it sort of for me validates the changing and dynamic nature of the market that we are living in, the technological changes, the consumer behavior changes that are happening at very fast speeds,” Roberts said.

Less than a week before it announced its $67 billion merger with AT&T, DirecTV continued to hold talks with an undisclosed competitor, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

DirecTV first held talks with the competitor, identified only as Company A, back in 2011, but broke off discussions in September of that year without an offer being made.

While Company A was not identified in the SEC filings, Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen was said to have contacted White about merger possibilities shortly after the Comcast/TWC deal was announced, according to several published reports.

DirecTV Chairman Mike White and his counterpart at Company A met briefly when both attended a conference in Washington DC in December of 2013, discussing operational challenges and the potential for a combination. Those talks heated up in February 2014, in the wake of Comcast’s announcement that it would buy Time Warner Cable in a deal valued at about $69 billion in stock and assumed debt. DirecTV and Company A continued to hold discussions at a dinner meeting the evening of the Comcast/TWC announcement, with the DirecTV board requesting further information on Company A’s spectrum holdings, its strategic alternatives and further analysis into the likelihood of receiving regulatory approval for a deal.

Chromecast owners aren’t getting tired of their streaming stick, after all: Chromecast usage continues to grow, according to data Google shared at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

This comes after a recent study claimed that Chromecast owners use the device less than they did half a year ago. Still, it’s interesting to see Google’s growth curve, which shows a huge spike over the holiday season as everyone was trying out their devices, with usage leveling off after that and then picking up again toward Q2 of 2014.

The latter could possibly be attributed to more apps becoming available for Chromecast after Google opened the Google Cast SDK in early 2014.