Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

online.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 332 posts

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#91

Post by brubaker »

chimeracoder wrote: post #59
suprgeek wrote: post #11

If this merger goes thru, (and the AnitTrust people would have to be really asleep at the wheel for that) two things are certain: 1) Americans can expect some of the worst Cable price gouging they have ever seen 2) NetFlix, Amazon Prime et al will become really popular as a result of all the customers saying "FU ComcastWarner"

> 2) NetFlix, Amazon Prime et al will become really popular as a result of all the customers saying "FU ComcastWarner" I agree with your first point, but your second point doesn't follow. If anything, Comcast will price gouge Netflix out of business, and we'll be back to being stuck watching their awful "On Demand" instead. They can do this, because Comcast owns the content (NBC), the delivery mechanism for said cont…

Comcast should not be allowed to own NBC

If this deal goes through, both companies should have to sell off all content companies and become strictly utility access providers.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#92

Post by existencebox »

zacinbusiness wrote: post #82

I hate TWC with a great and fiery passion. I literally shake when I think about the company. And from my understanding, most Comcast subscribers feel the same way about their service. This sort of thing makes me angry, not because I think the monopoly will be worse than it currently is. But because these mega-companies have so much power and influence that they can make their own laws. A free and open internet simply…

There seems to be a lot of buzz around that technical solutions won't dig us out of this hole; and while I agree that we definitely need some dramatic power shift to happen, I feel like there are technical solutions on the horizon. There are a lot of compelling mesh network/darknet projects going on, fast forward wireless tech a few years, it may be more feasible than ever. Use your anger as motivation.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#93

Post by karmajunkie »

jonknee wrote: post #61
fennecfoxen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To go with non-WSJ paywall article: non-paywall WSJ article! https://www.google.com/search?q=http://online.wsj.com/news/a...

Or even better, I setup Chrome to use a referer of "google.com" for all requests to online.wsj.com--no paywall or need to search for headlines. I'm sure there are other ways, but the extension Referer Control makes this easy as can be: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/referer-control/hn...

oh that's beautiful... thanks for posting that!

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#94

Post by yarou »

hobs wrote: post #83
rayiner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see Google enter that fight instead of trying to regulate their competition away. Not because I'm that anti regulation, but because I don't appreciate the irony of Silicon Valley always bitching about regulation, but then demanding that the government create an artificial reality where owning the pipes doesn't give you a natural competitive advantage.

Would you appreciate it if one supermarket bought all the food and then price gouged you 100 dollars for meat? I don't see how a monopoly helps anyone but the corporation, and even then just in dollars today. Strangling the entire market doesn't help anyone in the long run.

Actually, they wouldn't arbitrarily price their products that way. Companies engage in a little thing called price discrimination. The only difference in a monopoly is that you are the sole price leader. That doesn't mean you can arbitrarily set the price high. Most cable companies have monopolies thru license in municipalities.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#95

Post by rayiner »

hobs wrote: post #83
rayiner wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see Google enter that fight instead of trying to regulate their competition away. Not because I'm that anti regulation, but because I don't appreciate the irony of Silicon Valley always bitching about regulation, but then demanding that the government create an artificial reality where owning the pipes doesn't give you a natural competitive advantage.

Would you appreciate it if one supermarket bought all the food and then price gouged you 100 dollars for meat? I don't see how a monopoly helps anyone but the corporation, and even then just in dollars today. Strangling the entire market doesn't help anyone in the long run.

I'm not denying the antitrust concern of the union. I'm pointing out the hipocrisy of certain generally anti-regulation Silicon Valley companies trying to use antitrust law to preserve the viability of their role as middlemen. At the end of the day, Netflix's business model is inherently fragile. Amazon is somewhat better positioned, because they at least provide the upstream infrastructure. I think they know they need to play the last mile game, just as they're exploring doing on the physical goods side with drones and special deals with USPS.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#96

Post by niels_olson »

alttab wrote: post #86
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they will have a huge "content and subscriber" stick to wave around at Aero, Netflix, Apple and anyone else wanting to play the net content hero. That's really the play here. Get a ton more captive users in order to better extort Netflix et al for access to those customers, and beat that stick until all their over the top service competitors are either out of business or uncompetitive. Then the real screwing o…

Cheaper and faster urban mobile networks will take over before that reality is allowed for an extended period of time in some protracted way.

Err, simple physics ensures mobile will never have the bandwidth of copper wire. Every band and protocol can be transmitted over the wire to each node independently.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#97

Post by kevinalexbrown »

Does it strike anyone else as curious that the two largest cable/internet providers merge, and it doesn't matter because they already don't compete? It might be a sign that something's odd if the premise is that there's no competition between identical products to harm in the first place.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#99

Post by AnthonyMouse »

alttab wrote: post #86
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then they will have a huge "content and subscriber" stick to wave around at Aero, Netflix, Apple and anyone else wanting to play the net content hero. That's really the play here. Get a ton more captive users in order to better extort Netflix et al for access to those customers, and beat that stick until all their over the top service competitors are either out of business or uncompetitive. Then the real screwing o…

Cheaper and faster urban mobile networks will take over before that reality is allowed for an extended period of time in some protracted way.

I think people are overly optimistic about the ability to endlessly increase the performance of wireless networks. The existing networks make fairly efficient use of the spectrum they're allocated. That means you really only have two options to make it go faster.

1) More spectrum. But it's massively in demand (read: expensive), nobody wants to give any up, and even if you had "all" the spectrum there are still practical physical limits about how much data you can transmit without using a wavelength that won't penetrate walls.

2) More towers that each use lower power. This is the one that can get you almost arbitrarily large amounts of wireless bandwidth, but it's also the one whose cost converges on the cost of building a new fiber optic network as the number of towers you need approaches the number of users you have.

Neither one of those is going to make for an inexpensive roll out of a wireless network capable of handling Netflix's video traffic to millions of customers simultaneously in the same city.

Re: Comcast Acquiring Time Warner Cable In All Stock Deal Worth $45.2 Billion

#100

Post by crag »

ritchiea wrote: post #7

Who benefits from large corporate mergers like this? What does an all stock deal mean at that kind of magnitude? It certainly feels like little else than a handshake deal to create a monopoly.

"Who benefits from large corporate mergers like this?"

You might think the share holders. Not correct. Though they don't lose.

Think: the law firms handling the deal. This type of deal is worth millions in fees; banks - both investment (for finding the cash) and traditional (for providing the cash); and the governments which would levy taxes and fees. And of course anything below the public view (kick-backs, trips, outright campaign donations). I mean it's no surprise they picked a campaign year to merge. ;) The companies have probably been talking about this for at least a year.

It might not go through. If there is enough back lash from other companies. Happened with ATT recently. What will matter are other content providers (Disney, Fox, Viacom, etc etc) - though it wouldn't surprise me if they get certain guarantees they we won't know about.

Netflix doesn't really have any muscle on the ground to fight this. But if they could form a coalition of sorts, with the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple, FB, Twitter, (maybe even) MS and Sony (they have a stake in this too), etc, etc - combined they'd be a formidable force that Commcast/TM would have to deal with.

And then there's us. But I hold little hope for the american public to rally around any cause. Plus too many are too easily swayed.

My hope lies in a the coalition of net companies I mentioned.

Post reply on HN