AT&T + Time Warner:
Good for the people? Or Bad?
By Shlomo Maital
AT&T has just announced it is acquiring Time Warner for $85 b. The deal must be approved by the FCC Federal Communications Commission and antitrust authorities.
What is going on here?
Frank Biondi, former head of media giant Viacom, describes it succinctly. AT&T has 125 cell phone customers and a large number of cable TV customers. It is essentially a US ‘media and communications’ distribution company, one of the biggest. AT&T was once huge, was broken up by an aggressive anti-trust judge, and is now reforming and again becoming a giant player.
Time Warner, including HBS and CNN, is a ‘content’ company. It creates the content, like the hit series Game of Thrones, that AT&T distributes.
So, Biondi says, AT&T is buying, for $85 b. (14 times the value of Manchester United, for instance) “access to creative talent”. Because today the value in communications is not in the infrastructure and distribution, but in what you put onto this infrastructure. AT&T is buying a seat at the creativity table.
Will AT&T favor, like a monopoly, content its own companies create? Probably not. If AT&T customers want to watch something else, and AT&T fails to provide it, they will lose millions of customers in the blink of an eye.
I think that what is interesting about this mega-deal is this: Ideas have become hugely valuable and creative talent is now the focus of competitive strategy. If you are creative, if you have ideas, the AT&T+Time Warner deal says: The future is yours.
TIMnovate 
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October 31, 2016 at 10:54 am
David Chester
The subject of theoretical macroeconomics has been so badly treated by the humanities in the past that it is regarded as a dismal pseudo science. May people have complained about this, but somehow nobody seems to have done much about it. Since the Technion is involved with innovation, it should surely be interested in the means to revive this subject and turn it into a more exact and logical science.
I believe I have achieved this aim with my recently published book “Consequential Macroeconomics–Rationalizing About how our Social System Works”. As a retired engineer who has written and seen published several technical papers in aeronautical matters (including some presented at the Technion), you should expect this new book to contain a logical and more exacting model and analysis of our social system, than in the past. It does! and a lot more.
I would like to share this 320 page book with Prof. Shlomo Maital and any others who are this way inclined. Please write to me for an e-copy, chesterdh@hotmail.com