Time Warner Cable History

As of late 2004, Verizon is already considered the world's largest telecommunication company with annual revenue of $67.8 billion. Their continued plans are leading toward acquisition and development of fiber technology, which will allow it to offer cable TV services. Apparently they are still apprehensive regarding business customer and plan to extend add-ons again into the private sector, which worked for them in 2003.

Comcast is the leading cable telecommunications and Entertainment Company in the industry. Their strengths lie in their products and the will to explore and improve with their services. They always continue to provide customers with new and improved services and continue to build on existing services. Comcast is the fourth largest cable company in the world and served customers in 39 states with over 24.7 million cable customers. (Comcast, 2008). The chart below shows the amount of subscribers in the country:

Comcast practices the ‘Best-cost provider strategy’ in a business model that promotes convince for their customers by offering integrated services all on one bill. “Best-cost provider strategies are a hybrid of low-cost provider and differentiation strategies that aim at satisfying buyer expectations on key quality/features/performance/service attributes and beating customer expectations on price” (Gamble et. All) The elements in the best-cost provider strategy include: bundles with internet, cable and telephone services at varying internet speed, cable channels and levels of telephone service; different cable packages with different channels and promotional deals and

questions about the merger with Time Warner Cable (Carr). Many want to know how it is possible for the largest cable company to acquire the second largest cable company (Carr).

The cable provider would purchase 50 percent of Store Communications Inc., which increased the number of subscribers to over 2 million. At this point in time the company was recognized as one of the largest cable providers in the nation. The company would continue to add subscribers as they acquire Maclean Hunter’s U.S. cable operations, adding 550,000 customers and becoming the third largest cable operator in the United States with approximately 3.3 million customers in 1994. A year later they continued to add subscribers at an alarming rate when they announced the acquisition of E.W. Scripps cable systems, adding 800,000 subscribers and bringing Comcast’s customer total to 4.3 million. In another effort to add more subscribers in 2000 with the acquisition of Lenfest Communications, Inc., the company is able to add approximately 1.3 million cable subscribers. While adding subscribers is important to the business plan, Comcast was always looking for ways to appeal to their customers: specifically, the ones who enjoyed watching sports. So along with entrepreneur and owner

From 1984 until 1996 AT&T was an integrated telecommunications services and equipment company, succeeding in a newly competitive environment. In 1995 On September 20, AT&T announces that it is restructuring into three separate companies: a services company, retaining the AT&T name; a products and systems company (later named Lucent Technologies) and a computer company (which reassumed the NCR name). Lucent is spun off in October 1996, and NCR in December, 1996. Three years later AT&T announces general availability of its local residential telephone service in New York with a bundled plan called "AT&T Local One Rate New York." This is AT&T's first general reentry into the consumer local telephone business since the breakup of the Bell System. It occurs under the provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Telecommunications Act triggered dramatic changes in the competitive landscape. SBC Communications Inc. established itself as a global communications provider by acquiring Pacific Telesis Group (1997), Southern New England Telecommunications (1998) and Ameritech Corp. (1999). In 2005, SBC Communications Inc. acquired AT&T Corp., creating the new AT&T. With the merger of AT&T and BellSouth in 2006, and the consolidated ownership of Cingular Wireless and YELLOWPAGES.COM, AT&T is positioned to lead our industry in one of its most significant transformations since the first

The main issue is the combinations of the two different cultures between AOL and Verizon. I have no doubt that the two companies can benefit each other financially, market share growth, and with development of new products/services. However, all that is dependent on how the cultures and ideologies mix. Like I had said earlier, AOL’s view of business is that they take care of their employees first and focus more internally. They believe that happy and healthy employees lead to happy customers and a healthy business. Verizon believes the exact opposite, and that we must focus on the customers and market first. They believe that the success will then lead to the employees feeling well about there jobs and the environment they are in, more outwardly

The New York Times' article called "Making Sense of AT&T's Bid for Time Warner" describes a potential chance of merging two media giants – Time Warner, and AT&T. Time Warner is a massive media corporation, owner of CNN, HBO, Warner Bros studio and other assets. AT&T is currently the second-largest wireless carrier. Moreover, the recent purchase of DirectTV made AT&T also a major actor in the pay - TV business. The 85 billion dollar deal is expected to redesign the media and telecommunication world.

In 2001 Comcast would acquire AT&T Broadband the largest internet provider at the time for $44.5 billion. The merger would yield just the Comcast name. In 2002 Comcast would acquire all of AT&T Broadband’s assets and make them the largest cable television company in the United States. On April 30th 2006 Comcast would acquire Susquehanna Cable Company and all subsidiaries for $775 million. They would acquire 387,000 previous Susquehanna customers and transfer them to the basic, digital, and high speed cable that Comcast provided at the time. In April 2005 Comcast and Time Warner Cable would declare plans of purchasing the assets of bankrupt Adelphia Cable. Both companies would both pay $17.6 billion through cash and stocks. The deal was finalized

Comcast had 8.5 million subscriber and $1 billion investment from Microsoft and several entertainment assets were included.

On October 22, 2016, AT&T bought out Time Warner for eighty-five billion dollars. The agreement totaled to be one-hundred and nine dollars with debt. Time Warner is the parent company to many big name channels including, CNN, TNT, HBO and Warner Bros. This major purchase proves that AT&T has a totally different strategy than its big-time rival, Verizon. CFO of Version, Fran Shammo, commented in response to AT&T’s deal, stating that he believes they have the right asset and that there is no large company out there that they need to purchase in order to be successful. Verizon recently made some smaller purchases but seemed but more insignificant with AT&T’s major buy. For nine million billion dollars, AT&T acquired AOL and Yahoo. They

Mobile carrier company AT&T has been under media and authoritative attention since the new pricing strategy of its DirecTV service have been announced. Additionally, initial talks between AT&T and entertainment company Warner Times regarding a merger are leading to investigate research by authorities including the anti-trust authority FCC (Heugens, 2016).

Share holders suffered even more, as stock prices plummeted from the time the merger was first announced. A major part of the failure of this merger was the fact that developing a “learning culture” was never considered, and no strategic vision was created for the newly merged organizations. For example Time Warner Cable’s high speed Internet services, Road Runner, as part of its profitable cable operations was never integrated with AOL as Case explained in his 2005 article in the Washington Post (6/ 11/05: B01). The first AOL Time Warner Annual Report (2000) claimed that it was fostering “… a nimble, entrepreneurial culture that recognizes that it can only succeed if everyone supports the new organization based on a shared set of values and common goals.” Unfortunately, the team-work necessary to integrate the two companies never happened, because there was no shared strategic vision of what the merger should be, and where it would be going. Merger Failure and the Need for a Culture of Learning According to some estimates, 85% of merger failures are related to the mismanagement of cultural issues. Awareness of cultural differences is then seen as an issue of primary concern when organizations merge. According to Miller (2000:8): “Once you develop an understanding of the current culture, and have compared that with the goals of the merged

Time Warner is also taking part in joint ventures which bring it more opportunities to advertise and sell its products. For example, in 1993 Time Warner and US West worked together to improve U.S. cable systems to an interactive fiber-optic data highway that could lead to such direct services to the home as music on demand and video on demand. This deal was based on U.S. West investing $2.5 billion in Time Warner Inc. which gave them a big stake (25.5%)in

Cablecom is one of the largest broadband cable operators in Zurich, Switzerland. It was founded by affiliation of many small companies in 1994. It operates in many cities of Switzerland and having 73% market share. It is part of UPC broadband which is owned by Liberty global. Cablecom provides television s and internet services. It provides services to 2 million customer and having revenue around 1.34 billion CHF in 2015. Currently it owns more than 2500 employees. The main services provided by Cablecom are Analogue and Digital cable TV and radio, telephone and internet.