The government and AT&T clashed on Thursday as each launched their opening salvos in a far-reaching trial on the telecom giant’s proposed $85 billion merger with Time Warner.
ATT-TW Case Holds Future Of TV In Balance
Fans will be glued to the “March Madness” college basketball tournament as the joint owner of rights for the games, Time Warner Inc, goes before a judge today to defend a proposed takeover by AT&T Inc. With some 12 million viewers per game last year, the NCAA tournament exemplifies the marquee programming the U.S. government argues will become more expensive if Time Warner is bought by AT&T, the biggest pay-TV provider via subsidiary DirecTV.
AT&T says it needs to buy Time Warner to compete with the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Google in the rapidly evolving world of video entertainment. The Justice Department’s antitrust lawyers worry that consumers will end up paying more to watch their favorite shows, whether on a TV screen, smartphone or tablet.
D.C. Federal District Judge Richard Leon oversees the first day of “trial” concerning AT&T’s proposed $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner.
The talk in media circles is focused on what happens if the AT&T deal is stopped by the government and Time Warner is forced to go it alone.
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CNN is launching a new virtual reality experience for Oculus Rift. CNN VR has been available on Android and iOS for Samsung Gear headsets and Google Daydream. Adding the Oculus Rift headset brings the VR experience to the desktop, at high resolution.
In a standoff with far-reaching implications, the government claims that the megamerger would give AT&T, which already owns the nation’s largest pay-TV provider, DirecTV, added clout to bully others, freeze out new entrants in the TV industry and increase rates for consumers. The dispute — a rare standoff in an antitrust case — will be decided by a federal judge after a trial that begins Monday in Washington, barring a last-minute settlement.
Two titans — the U.S. Justice Department and telecommunications giant AT&T Inc. — are locked in a high-stakes showdown to decide who controls some of the nation’s most popular television channels.
“AT&T is merging with Time Warner not to thwart online viewing, but to advance it, by enabling AT&T to introduce new video products better suited to mobile viewing,” the company writes in papers submitted to a federal judge in New York.
Before Sam Nunberg’s unprecedented media tour had even ended Monday night, debate broke out over whether networks should have kept airing live interviews with the former Donald Trump aide as he seemed to self-destruct before viewers’ eyes.
The two networks are long and bitter rivals, of course, and have tweaked each other off and on since Fox News’s inception in 1996. But the crossfire has taken on new intensity in the Trump era. Hosts at CNN and Fox now trade blows almost daily about whose coverage or commentary about President Trump is more distorted or unfair.
CNN President Jeff Zucker has joined the chorus asking tech and ad firms to help monetize news on mobile platforms. “Otherwise, good journalism will go away,” Zucker said in Barcelona.
CNN boss Jeff Zucker has called upon advertisers and tech firms to help find new way to monetize news content on mobile platforms, and on authorities to pay closer attention to the power wielded by Google and Facebook, as news providers try to adapt to the changing digital landscape.
CNN, The Miami Herald and The South Florida Sun Sentinel filed a civil lawsuit in Broward Circuit Court today in an effort to obtain footage of the outside of the building where the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place earlier this month.
The event, led by Jake Tapper, bests cable news during its two-hour run on Wednesday night.
The Department of Justice on Friday moved to prevent AT&T from arguing that politics played a role in the government’s decision to stop its merger with Time Warner Inc, a deal that President Donald Trump had publicly criticized. “There was no selective enforcement,” Justice Department lawyer Craig Conrath said at a pre-trial hearing. “The president is unhappy with CNN. We don’t dispute that. But AT&T wants to turn that into a get-out-jail-free card for their illegal merger.”
The company is requesting that Makan Delrahim testify in the trial over the government’s decision to block its $85 billion merger with Time Warner, according to two people with knowledge of the pretrial activity.
A year ago, CNN was positioning itself as ready to take on Vice and BuzzFeed in the digital space. Now, the company is rightsizing as it prepares for AT&T’s embrace. It’s targeting big savings on the digital side, with as many as 50 jobs around the globe scheduled to be eliminated this week, according to people familiar with the matter, who noted the exact number could still be in flux.
CNN has half as many solo female hosts as its competitors — and none in primetime.
CNN is shooting down reports that its president Jeff Zucker is a candidate to run the Walt Disney Co.’s ESPN. Disney has been looking for a new top executive to run the beleaguered sports media giant since the sudden departure of John Skipper, who left the company Dec. 18 to deal with a drug addiction.
CNN has ended its daily newscast designed for Snapchat users just four months after launching it. CNN and Los Angeles-based Snap Inc. said the program, called The Update, failed to generate enough advertising revenue to sustain itself.
The judge overseeing the Justice Department’s bid to stop AT&T from buying Time Warner said Thursday that he would deny a request to tighten protections on confidential data.
Walt Disney Co joined 21st Century Fox on Wednesday in asking the judge hearing AT&T Inc’s antitrust case to strengthen an order aimed at keeping its data private if it is used at trial next year.
