AT&T’s $48.5 billion bid for your everything
AT&T is buying satellite TV company DirecTV in a $48.5 billion deal. Like so many other media mergers, the news has executives and Wall Street analysts tossing around corporate buzzwords. There’s the old favorite “synergy,” of course. But “bundle” is the key word for this proposed combination.
“They can bundle this with a broadband product and offer a bundle of voice, video and broadband, which they haven’t been able to do in a lot of their footprint up until now,” says Jonathan Chaplin at New Street Research.
Grabbing America’s biggest satellite provider allows AT&T to expand its move to sell more services on one bill nationwide.
If the deal goes through, AT&T would be the second largest American pay TV operator. Its 26 million customers would be just behind a combined Comcast-Time Warner Cable, which would have 30 million if its own proposed merger goes through.
AT&T is already offering significant concessions, enough that Wall Street expects regulators will let its deal go through.
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