The Trickle Down of the AT&T/Time Warner Merger?
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AT&T acts like their merger with Time Warner will have no impact on CNN, but what other trickle down events might be trigger by the mega merger?
And could another announced mega merger be far off?
The announcement of AT&T and Time Warner agreeing to merge comes some 6 years after Comcast and NBC-Universal agreed to their merger, and General Electric later selling its share of NBC-Universal. There's been some rumblings recently about CBS and Viacom possibly getting back together.
With the AT&T-Time Warner merger in the works, it'll be interesting to see which properties will remain in the portfolio, and conditions that the DOJ and FCC will implement. There's WPCH-TV, the only Turner Broadcasting owned over-the-air TV station, which is operated via LMA by Meredith Corporation, which owns Atlanta CBS affiliate WGCL-TV, and whether Meredith could be considering whether to acquire the station outright, and whether WPCH-TV would still be able to keep its super-station status. The station broadcasts Atlanta Braves baseball games during the MLB regular season. Other possible option would be the spectrum incentive auction, whether it could change RF channel positions (keep virtual channel 17), and the chances of the station going dark would be slim to none.
With the spectrum incentive auction, there's already rumblings about KRON (Media General-Nexstar) possibly going dark in 2017. Other stations that could go dark in the auction... another San Francisco independent station KOFY (Granite), Tampa Bay independent station WMOR (Hearst), and DFW independent station KFWD (London)... and some mid-sized to smaller market stations (Birmingham, Charleston, Augusta, Tallahassee, Chattanooga, etc.) that were sold to Nexstar Media Group, Gray Television, Sinclair Broadcast Group, and so forth, after the FCC voted on ending sharing agreements. Paxson Communications could definitely benefit from the auction, assuming the Ion stations change RF channel positions or go dark... and we won't know the final outcome till the auction is over.
