Comcast-NBCU Opposition Lines Up

The response out of Washington Thursday was swift to the announcement of the Comcast/NBCU deal and the promises the company made to make it more palatable in Washington. Free Press, the Consumer Federation of America, and Public Knowledge all have concerns about the union.

Analysts at investment firm Stifel Nicolaus early on said they expect a Comcast/General Electric jointly owned NBC Universal to pass government muster. They argue that while they expect the Department of Justice to be "more open" to concerns about vertical integration -- owning both the content and the distribution -- it would be tough to establish that the combo would be sufficiently anticompetitive" to warrant blocking the deal. They suggested baseball-style arbitration for disputes over regional sport nets, collective bargaining for small cable operators and program access guarantees as likely precedent for those conditions. They also pointed to the rise of AT&T and Verizon as video competitors who would likely push hard for conditions, as well as online video interests like Hulu, in which NBCU has a stake, as factors that would complicate the analysis.

Stacey Higginbotham writes that regulators will likely require non-discrimination clauses that mean Comcast won't be able to block access to certain content for other pay-TV providers or ISPs in search of a competitive advantage. But by simply owning the assets Comcast is able to profit off the fees paid for its cable channels by its competitors who want to carry those channels. It's worthwhile to note that in a letter detailing its commitment to the public interest, Comcast focuses mostly on appeasing worries about consolidation in the current media landscape of pay-TV, rather than making promises about the new media landscape of web TV. Simply by owning these assets, Comcast could take a significant chunk of them off the web, or put them behind its TV Anywhere efforts, now dubbed Xfinity, under its control.