Well, it’s official.

Comcast boss Brian Roberts told his troops yesterday that the company was ending its $45.2 billion bid to merge with Time Warner Cable.

“Today, we move on,” Roberts said in a statement Friday. “Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.”

The death of the Comcast-TWC merger doesn’t spell the end of consolidation in the cable field—although it probably does immediately scuttle a few related transactions.

An agreement to shift some 3.9 million Comcast and TWC subscribers to Charter is most likely dead, as is Charter’s takeover of Bright House.

But analysts now expect Charter to make a new bid for TWC. A 2014 offer by Charter was rebuffed ahead of the Comcast proposal.

Read More: Variety, TV News Check

Brief Take: That rapidly evolving television landscape we all like to talk about means that the era of consolidation is far from over in Cableland. With subscriber numbers dropping and new platforms and providers coming online, look for more tie-ups very soon in the future.

Tags:


  Save as PDF