Consolidation fever is sweeping through America’s communications markets. This week, AT&T agreed to buy DirecTV, and regulators are still grappling with the question of what America’s pay TV and broadband markets might look like if the country’s two biggest cable companies, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, are allowed to unite. Today, SNL Kagan put out these nifty maps that give an indication of what Comcast’s market power might look like if the deal ends up getting through.
As we can see from the map above, the new Comcast will have a presence in pretty much all of the major population centers in the US. The biggest gains are in southern California, New York and the Carolinas.
To get the deal through, Comcast has also agreed to divest 1.4 million of Time Warner Cable’s customers to Charter Communications, which would then become the second biggest cable company in the US. The Wall Street Journal has a good rundown of that complex agreement, which will also, among other things, see Charter swap customers in Los Angeles and New York to Comcast (as the map above shows).