This Saturday one of the biggest media deals in history has gone down. The Wall Street Journal has reported that AT&T has struck a deal to buy Time Warner for more than 80 Billion Dollars, which would cause the two already huge companies to become one even larger. An agreement that will change the media landscape dramatically. AT&T will now expand so that they have control over “valuable brands spanning television, film, sports, news, video games and mobile and residential Internet service.” Becoming one of the biggest media- and tech companies in the world.
Time Warner “owns HBO, CNN, Warner Bros movie studio, the D.C. Comics brand” and many other media assets. All of which will now belong to AT&T causing AT&T to evolve into a kind of media company that is unprecedented in history. Their reach would span from providing the internet, to tv-shows, to news, to sports, to video games. Giving it control and incite into almost every part of the media- and tech industry.
According to the Washington Post, while this deal is unique in its size, it is not unique in its purpose. Many companies are now attempting to branch out and gain control over as big a part of the content that the media and its users put out as possible. In a way to increase their power and reach. One way to do that is to expand your platform, like Facebook with its live streams, or to do as AT&T is now doing and buying other media outlets.
If this expansion of AT&T is a good or bad thing is set to become a very controversial issue.
Huge companies controlling a significant amount of an industry brings back memories from the 2008 financial crisis with banks that were “too big to fail.” And although, this isn’t the same thing one company with as much control as AT&T is about to have is bound to raise some eyebrows. What the particular outfall of this deal will be is something that we’ll have to wait and see, but what is certain is that it will have a substantial impact on the future of the media landscape.
