NEW YORK — As TV watchers increasingly look online for their fix, cable companies are bulking up. In the latest round, Charter Communications is buying Time Warner Cable for $55.33 billion.
And executives say they’re confident regulators will allow the creation of another U.S. TV and Internet giant.
Closer to home
Charter Cable operates area offices in Jasper and Cleveland, Tenn., and Dalton, Ga.
By the numbers
* $56.7 billion: What Charter Communications will pay to buy Time Warner Cable * $10.4 billion: What Charter Communications will pay to buy Bright House Networks * 24 million: Number of Charter cable subscribers after the pending mergers * 27 million: Number of Comcast cable subscribers
The deal comes a month after Comcast, the country’s largest cable provider and owner of NBCUniversal, walked away from a $45.2 billion bid for Time Warner Cable, the No. 2 cable company, after intense pressure from regulators. The government worried that the company would be able to undermine increasingly popular online video competitors like Netflix because the bigger Comcast would have more than half the country’s high-speed Internet customers.