Charter clears hurdle for buying Bright House, Time Warner
NEW YORK - The Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday authorized Charter Communications to buy Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable, a merger that will create the country's second-largest cable and internet provider. The combined entities, called New Charter, will be No. 3 in video, trailing Comcast and AT&T, which bought DirecTV last year.
In statements on Monday, the FCC and the DoJ announced their respective approvals of the agreement with a series of restrictions to protect the rights of consumers and the growing sector for distributing videos via the Internet.
Charter will pay $78.7 billion for Time Warner Cable and $10.4 billion for Bright House Networks.
The resulting group, known as New Charter, will have 24 million customers in 41 states, following only Comcast, which has 27 million customers.
To be able to execute the purchase, which was announced in May 2015, Charter promised to adhere to a series of conditions that the FCC and DoJ imposed to guarantee competitiveness in the offering of videos via cable and the Internet.
One order by the DoJ prohibits striking unfair competition agreements with programmers that would keep shows and movies off streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
"Online video distributors offer consumers greater choices for video services. ... Together with our counterparts at the FCC, we have secured comprehensive relief and we will work together to closely monitor compliance to ensure that New Charter will not have the power to choke off this important source of disruptive competition and deny consumers the benefits of innovation and new services," said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Renata B. Hesse, head of the Antitrust Division.
Meanwhile, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said that "The cumulative impact of these conditions will be to provide additional protection for new forms of video programming services offered over the Internet." EFE