AT&T wastes no time in completing Time Warner acquisition

A mere two days after a judge rejected the US government’s attempt to block it, AT&T has completed its $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner.

The giant US telco is now the owner of some of the biggest properties and brands in the media world. HBO is arguably the number one producer of premium video content, responsible for Game of Thrones and Westworld as well as all-time classics The Wire and The Sopranos. Turner owns a bunch of major broadcast TV channels including CNN and Cartoon Network, while Warner Brothers is one of the big movie studios.

“The content and creative talent at Warner Bros., HBO and Turner are first-rate,” said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. “Combine all that with AT&T’s strengths in direct-to-consumer distribution, and we offer customers a differentiated, high-quality, mobile-first entertainment experience. We’re going to bring a fresh approach to how the media and entertainment industry works for consumers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.”

The strapline for the press release announcing the completion of the deal announces: “Positioned to be a Global Leader as a Modern Media Company. Set to Create the Best Entertainment and Communications Experiences in the World.” This chimes with the contemporary trend towards mutliplay and sets AT&T up as the big beast of this space.

The Time Warner name, which can be traced back to the launch of Time magazine in 1923, will now cease to exist. AT&T is adding a new super-silo to its corporate structure to accommodate these new media assets, alongside its communications, international and advertising business, but has yet to pick a name for it. You would presumably get short odds on ‘AT&T Media’.

That silo will be led by AT&T lifer John Stankey, who took over the AT&T Entertainment Group that was created to house DirecTV when it was snapped up for $50 billion or so in 2015. He’s going to get a crash course in running a media empire from former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes during a transition period of unspecified length.

“Jeff is an outstanding leader and one of the most accomplished CEOs around,” said Stephenson. He and his team have built a global leader in media and entertainment and I greatly appreciate his continued counsel.”

There are only two larger media companies out there: Comcast and Disney, who are currently in a bidding war for Twenty-First Century Fox, with the former outbidding the latter to the tune of 19% earlier this week by offering $65 billion, apparently hastened by the AT&T development. Fox, meanwhile has trying to buy Sky for ages, a process also complicated by Comcast’s gazumping tendencies.

The US seems to be feeling pretty laissez faire about massive comms/media consolidation but Europe might yet have something to say about all this. The Fox/Sky acquisition has been mainly held up by concerns about media plurality in terms of TV news and the more of this sort of M&A happens the more questions like these will be asked.