How Comcast and NBCUniversal Used Minions to Fuse an Empire

As these media giants get even larger so does their influence on government policy. At the moment, Net Neutrality is being assaulted on all fronts by these same media giants. If they get their way, look for even higher internet rates, a further onslaught of advertising and a direct threat to presently unencumbered alternative news sources.

Those Minions are symbolic of something. What? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Thank you.

I'm sure big companies are part of the American culture now. It's either hyper competition I'm niche markets or few big companies taking over the mainstream industry. Oh well, because there are big companies, we can afford to have big government (that's paid by these companies).

The fact that AT&T has 85 billion to invest means 2 things to me, they way overcharge for their services and they underpay their employees. This is how they should spend the money, half divided per capita for their employees, one fourth to the schools in Detroit and one fourth to help the homeless in New York and New Jersey. Then they should stop over charging customers. Any company with huge surpluses means they are overcharging customers and underpaying employees

The only power to save money that a consumer has against these behemoths is to cut services with one and jump to another. As they consolidate, any local market becomes little more than a depressing game of ping-pong between two companies that take turns ripping you off until you leave.

See here's the thing . NBC and Comcast may be ' thriving ' from their merger but as a Comcast customer all I've gotten since that fateful has been constant and dramatic raise in rates - abjectly miserable outsourced overseas based customer service with no option to speak to someone Stateside reading off of scripts and offering pat answers rather than dealing with specific issues - ever increasing outages and problems coming from the source [ with the Cable TV as well as their Internet service ] etc etc et al ad nauseam . Which is to say .. once again the corporate conglomerates profit ... while we the customer suffer in their ever increasing need to increase their bottom line more often than not to the detriment of the paying customer on the other end who in fact in their minds has become a commodity to be bought sold traded and profited off of rather than a customer to be served

When I hear people call the NYT a liberal paper I'm always shocked. I remember (still under 40) when even some Republicans would raise opposition to these mega-mergers. Now nothing from either side. Heck, we're letting Wanda Group run a monopoly that was thought impossible after the 1948 Paramount decision.

The head of the FCC Tom Wheeler was a huge Obama fundraiser before the post. Prior, he was the CEO of both major cable lobbies. Of the 93 lobbyists who work for the NCTA, 73 previously held government jobs. Of the 32 lobbyists at CTIA, 24 held gov't jobs.

Regardless of some political party you might agree with you and vote for, we live in a one-party corporate bribery system.

Every four years we hear about democratic duty, yada, yada - laughable.

My suggestion is that we all just disconnect our tv's from their cable, satellite and internet providers. Instead, try talking to your friends and family. Try reading a book. If enough people did this as a sign of protest for just a month, then maybe - just maybe - the entertainment conglomerates would start to serve guys better.

As I recall from previous news articles, the head of Comcast and President Obama are best buds. Lots of time together on the golf course and so on.

Want to bet that irate customers will be getting more of the same treatment from Comcast under Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton?

I cannot stand Comcast. They are becoming the closest thing to AT&T before "Ma Bell" was forced to break up (since it was a total monopoly) in the 1980's. TI can only hope they somehow get busted down somehow, because they rip so many people off it is outrageous. I know I am simplifying this, but as of this moment, Comcast is only superseded in Corporate greed by Big Pharma.

As others have written below, Comcast thrives by stifling competition and providing sub-par service. The company is also overdue for a Wells-Fargo-like investigation for signing customers up for services without their knowledge. These mergers are an invitation to corruption.

A headline that includes "Comcast" and "minions" is simply brilliant. The only word left out starts with an "E". Whether the word in question applies to Comcast or the minions is left as exercise for the reader.

The article says, "Comcast is the country’s largest cable company, selling television, broadband and phone service to 28.3 million customers. AT&T is the country’s largest television distributor after its acquisition last year of DirecTV, and counts more than 100 million subscribers across its wireless, broadband and TV offerings."

Service? What service? At one time cable was included at a very minimal charge - or free- to every multi-family complex that was built and it was a great service. The only "service" now is to the 85 BIG investors who own the majority of stock in America and the world. Thanks to Ronald Reagan's gutting of anti-trust laws and the destruction of OUR regulatory agencies in the past 40+ years these behemoths have been allowed to control OUR communications at every level, raise prices exponentially and steal OUR money and personal information for their greedy corporate use and even more profit. It is simply NOT acceptable. Predatory Corporate Capitalism central planning of OUR lives. Worse than socialism any day.

Comcast is "thriving" by abusing its monopoly power to make lots of money to keep its shareholders happy, and most importantly, to pay its executives ridiculously high salaries and bonuses.

Comcast wins, we lose.

Yet again, The Times comes out in enthusiastic favor of another corporate merger. The Gray Lady has published such one-sided puff pieces for as long as I've been a reader. And yet read the comments! One can gauge right away how out of step The Times can be when it comes to a.) how Americans truly feel about this constant corporate overreach and b.) how much harm this causes to John Q. Public. Face it, these mega-mergers only benefit corporate law firms, CEO's and shareholders.

Please write a retraction - Any customer can tell you that the Comcast merger is an epic fail and they have Donald Trump under a long-term contract for over $200 million a year. If this is what we can expect from AT&T in the future let us hope that particular merger fails to launch. We need better corporate citizens than Roberts and his minions.

After I bought an HD TV and discovered that I could get all my local channels over the air and in beautiful HD, and not only that, I could receive a bewildering array of American and international content (and no shopping, televangelist, or sports channels unless I somehow lost my mind and added them) with a streaming device, I dropped cable TV completely and just kept Internet from Comcast.

So what did Comcast do? They raised the price on my Internet connection so that it cost the same as Internet plus basic-basic TV.

Now they're whining about competition from streaming. Well, here's news to all the geniuses in Comcast's corporate hierarchy. Treat customers badly and they'll leave. You have the technology for a la carte cable--other countries manage it--but you pretended you didn't. So now your customers are creating their own a la carte cable with streaming channels.

I can hardly wait for a local company's fiber optic service to reach my neighborhood. Then I will cut all ties with Comcast.

Comcast and NBC are thriving, but their customers well, not so much. Really, competing with a superior product seems beyond their grasp.

Minions--the impish fire hydrant-shaped yellow misfits who exist to serve the world’s most evil villains--like COMCAST! Enough said!

I would take issue with the opening sentence. The sentence should have read:

Minions, the impish fire hydrant-shaped yellow misfits who exist to serve the world’s most evil villains, would appear to be the perfect mascots for corporate synergy at Comcast, one of the world’s largest media conglomerates.

And once the election is finally over, we can get back to what we really enjoy - bellyaching about how everything on this country is setup to rip us off anyway they can. Hillary will be just the grease that this machine needs, so luckily for us we'll even have more to bellyache about . . . hence, more fun. Hooray!

The companies can merge as much as they want, as far as I'm concerned because one big useless one is probably no worse than several useless ones. I'm ready to put the antenna back up on my house and welcome back good old VHF and UHF channels 2-52. There's more to be seen on them than the thousands of channels of nothing that DirectTV has recently screwed me with.

Minions sound a lot like politicians. It's interesting they're in the news the day before the big election. No doubt not a coincidence.

Thank you for the article. I, like many, grew up with Mickey Mouse as a presence.

I have never heard of a Minion, other than its dictionary meaning. I do know that Comcast operates as a societally harmful monopoly, and that as a citizen of the United States, I'm not alone in having no option but to continue to pay them for internet service, as there are alternatives.

I don't care about Minions. I don't care about how an ISP markets itself. I want at least two ISP options, and I want them in the business of internet service provision, not Minions.

You think it is easy getting to be the most despised company on the planet? No, it takes hard work. It takes complete contempt for your customers, whose legitimate complaints are flicked away like so much lint on a $5,000 suit by the chairman. It takes a thoroughly dispirited tech force beaten down by being repeatedly verbally lashed by understandably irate customers. It takes enabling and fawning happy-talk articles such as this current clueless one in the Times. And it takes a army of noxious collections agency personnel who harass and threaten with absolutely no concern for where the truth lies. The opening paragraph gets the metaphor all wrong. There is an Evil
Villain. His name is Brian L. Roberts. The rest of us are just the hapless minions.

Here's the big secret. Not really a secret to me. Comcast supports Demorats so when they want to merge, acquire, take over, whatever they get a blank check from the "populist" Dems. Never in the history of the United States has a company offered poorer service, screwed more consumers, and then got rewarded by the regulators. So now we have AT&T wishing to move us another step towards monopolization. Our only hope is that technology enables smaller players to enter the business.

No. The Comcast and NBCU merger is an abomination to the American public it serves. Owning the ariwaves, the cables and broadband transmission, as well as owning a large chunk of the content while simultaneously managing the transmission of content for its competitors is an awful deal. The television part of NBCU should not have been part of this competition stifling merger. Comcast continues to be one of the most reviled corporations in this country. The merger did not improve the collective revulsion of Comcast by those customers who have no choice but to use one of more of their broadband and streaming services.

How could the combined ATT and TW be different from the TW when it still has TW Cable? TW was once a content and a pipeline company and it didn't work. AOL and TW Cable have to be spun-off to realize value.

ATT will become more valuable should it focus on its core competencies that is delivering content- a pipeline company. ATT should focus its resources in developing, expanding, and improving its network rather than spend it on acquisitions outside its core competencies.

TW should do the same, it should invest in capabilities to make great relevant content. This way we create two great companies who in the long run will become more valuable.

Shareholders must be not be quick to swap genuine sustainable long term value creation over quick short term capital gains via financial engineering.

If the CEOs of the companies insist that the deal is the only way to value then the shareholders must demand management change.

Three cheers for vertical integration and an oligopolistic media! Look at all those examples from history of deregulated industries dominated by non-competitive pricing and limited choice, as you will find that it benefits consumers at least 2% of the time, maybe...See "both" sides win!

It may be a success for Comcast, but not for consumers.

My Comcast bill, with no changes to service or the expiration of any promotion went from about $120 to almost $200 per month. Part of the reason is that nobody is regulsting cable rates and Comcast is nickle and diming their customers for everything.

In late 2016 Comcast is charging an HD technology fee despite the fact that the digital transition is over and has been over for years. Comcast, after encrypting all the cable channels which mandates use of either a cable card or converter box, now charges for each cable card and box. They also relegate many channels, like BBC World News, to lower quality than NBC Universal owned channels like MSNBC which is located on 4 different channels on cable with 3 being in HD.

When my cable bill hit $200, I signed up for Sling TV and terminated the cable TV service- keeping only internet. One should also notice the steady upward creep of internet in areas where Comcast has no wired broadband competition. Areas of our metro with AT&T Fiber pay less for Comcast internet than the areas where only AT&T DSL service is available.

Comcast should be broken up, starting with the ill advised sale of NBC by General Electric even before the Universal buyout. The Comcast customers are getting hosed to pay for their vertical monopoly and the same will happen if AT&T is allowed to swallow Time-Warner whole.

One might ask why AT&T & Comcast do not build out their networks instead.

When you have only only a handful of companies controlling all facets of entertainment\airwaves\internet\phone and the like, then OUR choice dwindles.

Of course, we may have more content, but it is good or even what we want? Also, access becomes limited and more expensive. Caps on bandwidth and a two tiered internet are already developing.

We are one that pay on the bottom line.

This is the same Comcast that blocked subscribers from receiving the YES Network and watching Yankees games. I don't remember my cable bill going down because they were providing less service. I was being billed the same exorbitant prices for watching a test pattern.

The two companies may be thriving, however, as a Comcast customer I am not. Now they are even more arrogant, less customer friendly and increasing prices at an accelerated rate.

We have allowed too many large companies to merge in the last 15 years resulting in less competition, higher prices, less innovation and worse service.

We do not need to double down.

The writer seems to have left out one crucial side that is affected by such mergers--consumers. Have they benefited from the combining of Comcast and NBCUniversal? There is precious little consideration of that question in this piece. I would also caution readers that the NYT, as a major media corporation, may not be totally neutral on the subject of media consolidation.

Awful, awful, awful. I have no choice but Comcast or Verizon, and, big surprise, after the various special offers, they both charge basically the same exorbitant rates!

Internet these days is like power and water. It should be treated as a public utility. It's that simple - except, sadly, how to get there.

Who isn't thriving, is all the customers. Comcast has been implementing data caps on internet data usage, implying that an infinite resource is somehow limited. they are charging more to shine blue (higher frequency) light as opposed to red (lower frequency) light through their fiber.

AT&T also does that, coming from a long history of slowing us all down, with their $.25 a minute local calls up until they were broken up the first time. They'll bring caps to all the time warner customers too.

Only a huge monopoly can figure out a way to charge more money for a different color of light.

Because we have to suffer with these monopolies, we have a situation where they have absolutely no motive, with their huge captive audiences, to do anything about upgrading.

With them owning content, it just gets worse, as that content competes with the infrastructure, and everything else online, rendering upgrading unprofitable for such an entity.

Fact is, not only should Comcast be broken up, into a lot of small pieces, eliminating any and all vertical integration, but both AT&T and Time Warner also ought to be broken up.

We are never going to have the amazing new apps and uses of the future internet with these dinosaur behemoths blocking our way.

Just like in countries that block vertically integrated communications monopolies, our speeds would go up by orders of magnitude, while prices would go down, and choices would abound. So let's break these monsters up.

Why is it that the only measure of a successful merger is whether the corporations are thriving?
That would seem to be an analogous measure of whether the consumer is suffering more.

A successful corporate mercer, makes things worse for consumers, that's how it works.

I am going to say a word that these merger mad corporations run from as if it were the "Black Death." I dare the editors to print this word. In fact it is a word that shocks, un-nerves, and causes these regulators, bankers, and CEO's to react like Dracula to the stake that in the case of all of these rascals should be driven into the heart of most of these mergers. The word, shock, gasp, exclaim, is SERVICE!!!

The customer does not come first with these people. The customer continues to be exploited, and finally these corporations are being operated as Ponzi schemes for the less than 1%-ers.

The extension of"Synergy" to the streamlining of greed continues to be the "3rd. rail" of these deals for consumers. Where once we wondered "How much of our disposable income do video (and telephone) providers want?" We now know the answer to be "ALL of it". Here is where government regulation / oversight fail the system as a whole. Greed erodes many of those subtle constraints which hold systems (and humans) together. That this greed ultimately affects these media and technology companies dispersal of our shared culture and sense of community ultimately degrades these systems too. How to stem greed before it rots us from the inside out continues to be our National malaise.

Can we punish a company for horrendous customer service and sky high prices by dividing it? If so Comcast should be in little bits & pieces. Worst company I deal with on a monthly basis, most opaque, biggest liars, most duplicitous, evil stuff there.

Mergers consolidate the power of large corporations and destroy small businesses. Cancer is more like it. The only thing that grows only for the sake of growth.

"Mr. Burke’s closest friends and family had questioned his decision to join Comcast in 1998, when it was considered a relatively small, regional cable company."
Mr. Burke reportedly stated that he wanted to work for a CEO whom he would respect. In other words he apparently had no respect for Michael Eisner, then the CEO at The Walt Disney Company.

Not having looked at any of the financials, nor attempting to do any objective analysis regarding possible synergies between Comcast and NBCUniversal, I suspect that any such synergy is minimal.

The advantage to Comcast is control over content, in particular as a hedge against erosion of its oligopoly on entertainment distribution, and more important, Internet access.

The financial success of the merger is more likely simply due to the talents of Messrs. Roberts and Burke, along of course with the many other employees of both companies.

Mr. Burke is a remarkably energetic individual, intelligent and focused. He also has an outstanding knowledge of the businesses in which both Comcast and NBCUniversal are active. Different personality-wise than another talented executive in that set of industries, Jeffrey Bewkes, at Time-Warner, who is exceptionally intelligent, but both share decades of relevant experience in their industries.

Stop the mergers; they kill competition. They work for greed investors, speculators but not for the average American.

every merger means less choice for the consumer, regulations on media giants will erode due to the minions in congress and lobbyists.

Too few people are able to tell all of us what we will see and hear.
We need to break them up. Competition is good for America.

This is a joke. Why would The New York Times even print a puff piece like this? Is this an editorial in FAVOR of these merges? Is Emily Steel getting something from one of these players?
Point after point extolling the virtues of Comcast and how well they're doing?
Not ONE WORD about Comcast being the most hated company in the country with the lowest rated customer service?
Of course NBC and Comcast are thriving: they own content and the means of distribution.
I'm sure the shareholders are happy.
They only people getting screwed are the consumers.
Higher prices and fewer choices, the very thing that customers nationwide are complaining about. That only deserves one sentence here?
Where is the objectivity, New York Times?