Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable in all stock deal worth $159 per $TWC share- sources. Deal set for tomorrow morning. Ratio is 2.875 $CMCSA.
Context & Ripple Effects
CNBC's David Faber broke the terms overnight — $159 per Time Warner Cable share, entirely in Comcast stock at a 2.875 exchange ratio, roughly $44.2 billion — and by morning the story had traveled unusually far for a leak: Bloomberg, Re/code, Gigaom, Quartz, Business Insider, Digital Trends and Tech Trader Daily all carried versions of it within hours, making this one of the most widely syndicated deal scoops of the year so far.
The arc matters as much as the price. Reporting from late 2013 had [[a:|Time Warner Cable reaching out to Comcast]] about a combination as a way to head off a hostile bidder — unconfirmed then, but consistent with what Faber's sources describe today. And Comcast has been explicit about why it wants the scale: management said in November that it intends to dominate television for another fifty years, even while confirmed reporting showed it withholding gigabit speeds it already had the technical capacity to sell.
First-order effects
- Time Warner Cable shareholders swap a standalone stock for 2.875 Comcast shares apiece (~$159 today), while Comcast absorbs a national cable footprint without paying cash.
- The combined company immediately becomes the largest US pay-TV and broadband distributor, and the filing puts FCC and Justice Department reviewers in the position of judging whether that scale is tolerable before any integration begins.
Second-order effects
- Programmers and sports rights-holders now negotiate with a single distributor controlling both major cable brands' subscribers, shifting carriage-fee leverage sharply toward Comcast.
- Comcast's confirmed experiments — serving full ad loads on on-demand shows while capping gigabit availability — get a far larger subscriber base to monetize, raising the stakes for rivals still selling faster speeds or lighter ad loads.
Third-order effects
- If regulators approve the structure, US broadband consolidates around a handful of national-scale distributors whose market power comes from footprint rather than network quality — the gigabit question becomes a policy test case rather than a competitive one.
- A merged Comcast sets the template other cable operators would likely chase through their own combinations, pushing the industry toward fewer, larger gatekeepers between content owners and households.
The trend: US pay-TV and broadband are consolidating into a few national-scale distributors, with Comcast wagering that subscriber scale — not speed leadership — secures its decades-long grip on television.