The latest Time Warner Cable merger isn’t Comcast all over again, execs argue

Hanging over the Charter/Time Warner Cable announcement is Comcast. You can't talk about an acquisition of Time Warner Cable without discussing Comcast's failed bid for the nation's second-largest cable company, which collapsed in April. It's clearly something Charter has thought about, too -- and the company addressed the issue head-on in response to the first question on an investor call on May 26. "We're a very different company than Comcast, and this is a very different transaction," Charter chief executive Tom Rutledge said.

Just like the Comcast-TWC deal, the Charter-TWC merger has to be approved by federal regulators, including the Federal Communications Commission. Charter is already moving to counter some of the arguments that helped sink the Comcast merger. For instance, what executives are calling the "New Charter" will be much smaller than a Comcast-Time Warner Cable mash-up would have looked like, company officials say, which could help limit regulators concerns about potentially anticompetitive behavior. While a Comcast deal would have controlled more than half the country's high-speed Internet subscribers and roughly one-third of the nation's cable TV market, the latest deal would give Charter only about 30 percent market share in broadband and 17 percent in cable video, according to the company.