TWC has 277.9 million shares outstanding, and Comcast will reportedly pay $159/share, giving holders of TWC stock almost an 18% premium over the currently trading value of $135.31 (as of close yesterday). Comcast wants to close this deal by the end of 2014.
Of course I'm sure the Feds will be all over this deal, making sure I's are crossed and T's are dotted, given the vast sum of money we're talking about. I don't know a whole lot about the stock market, but I do know Comcast is a shit ISP, and if they acquire all of TWC, that will make them one gargantuan company with extraordinarily shitty policies.
Here are some links to reports on this: (remember though, this isn't official yet. Comcast hasn't announced anything as of yet)
Fuck my life. The only internet providers in my area are Comcast and TW. TW is a pile of shit already here, but Comcast is an even larger pile of shit. I don't even want to think about what might happen to the already finicky internet connection my house gets. We're lucky if we get the advertised 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up.
Who needs an Oligopoly when you're the only available service? Not Comcast. At the same time, this brings up questions about the infrastructure they're acquiring, as Time Warner (according to my knowledge, which could be wrong) is one of the largest Internet Backbone providers in the USA.
This really is surprising and likely very bad for the internet. I hope the FCC does its job here and seriously scrutinizes the deal.
Although this probably won't change much where Comcast already holds local monopolies on broadband service, which is much of its existing service. To try and get the deal to go through Comcast says it will divest itself of about 3 million subscribers in markets were Comcast and TWC directly compete. That's a pretty minimal concession to get FCC approval though.
The fact they would rather shed customers and go ahead with the merger is unsettling. I would think a good company would appreciate their customers more.
I'm hoping that this will be struck down just like the ATT and T-Mobile merger. These two companies take up way too much of the cable providers and a merger would just widen the gap between Comcast/Time Warner and whoever is in 3rd place.
As if it wasn't bad enough that Comcast has monopolies in several towns and cities, now they'll get thousands more.
I agree, I don't think many consumers would think of Comcast or TWC as good companies. In fact I think they are both consistently ranked the worst in customer service among all US companies.
This is really awful for consumers. As a company, Comcast sucks a lot less (in my opinion) than TWC... but that's not going to mean anything for the costumers being bought out. This is all on the premise that they wont need to touch the infrastructure that is in desperate need of improvement.
Like everyone else said, hopefully the FCC will stop this like they did with the T-Mobile deal, Robert Marcus will step down, and whoever takes his place will pull a John Legere and bring some new, real competition to the market.
this is very bad for the consumer, we need more competition not less. it's bad enough they make us pay for bandwidth and put data quotas on us when it cost them nothing to deliver the data and bandwidth.