Comcast-TWC: Cutting the Cord

Logo of Comcast Latina: Insigne Comcast (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Comcast, the communications giant that owns NBC, has called off its $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable citing too many regulatory hoops they had to jump through.  Really, it was all the opposition from government and consumer groups that they couldn't overcome.

Together, Comcast and TWC would have controlled nearly 30 percent of cable subscribers and 57 percent of broadband users.  That's why, to satisfy regulators, Comcast-TWC was willing to unload some of its territories (such as Minneapolis and St. Paul) on other cable providers such as Charter Communications.

When the proposed merger was announced, alarm bells rang in Washington and for those who cared about the future of the Internet.  If the government had approved the deal, the new company would have had monopolistic powers over who got on their broadband and how much they would have charged subscribers.  Which isn't a whole lot different from what's going on now, "net neutrality" or not.

Comcast already has the lowest customer service ranking of any American company, behaving in a way that's reminiscent of AT&T before the government broke up the phone company monopoly in the 1980s.  Well, that's also true of most cable providers whose exclusive rights to serve certain areas have been in place for decades.

Now that Comcast-TWC have severed ties, other possible unions in the communications have come to the forefront.  Charter is taking a second run at TWC, according to media reports.  AT&T is combining with DirecTV, once they can figure out how to explain to regulators how a phone company can coexist with a satellite provider.

But that won't change the fact that cable is becoming less and less popular with consumers, who are sick of paying through the nose for channels they don't want, opting for Internet streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Plus in addition to keeping an antenna for broadcast TV.  The thing is, though, they still have to go through a broadband service--most of whom are owned by cable providers. 

This is what providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are facing, and they are losing.  They must either adapt or die, and not be so arrogant about it.  They can't afford to.

Hillary Clinton For President, Take Two

Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley College) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It must have been a slow news weekend.  All CNN and the Sunday morning news programs wanted to talk about was the forthcoming announcement about Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations, and to speculate about how she would run her 2016 campaign.  That's what most of us were watching while waiting for the Masters TV coverage to start.

And there was Hillary, on a video release first shown on social media that looked like an insurance commercial.  The former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State--the woman who's been in our lives since her husband Bill first campaigned for the White House--now wants to be the first person of her gender to serve as President of the United States.

This isn't Clinton's first trip down the campaign trail.  She was favored to take the Democratic nomination in 2008, until a guy named Barack Obama came along and beat her to it.

This time around, Clinton has a clear field for the Democratic nomination, with Obama's two terms in the White House almost up.  Thus far, she has yet to receive a challenge from someone in her own party, and that could be a problem prior to July 2016 in Philadelphia.

The Republicans have no shortage of challengers for Clinton.  Three U.S. Senators have announced their candidacies so far:  Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida.  They are (or were) Tea Party and Libertarian darlings until they decided they wanted to be President.  The GOP wants to prove that they really are an inclusive party, so long as their candidates don't stray from the conservative line.  At least not until a more mainstream candidate decides to jump in.

Unlike those other guys, we know plenty about Hillary Clinton:  The highs and lows of her husband's Presidency, Benghazi and those State Department e-mails that her enemies keep bringing up.  What we have yet to find out is what she wants for the country, and how she would govern it.  She can't just count on name recognition alone.

John Dickerson of CBS (who was just named host of "Face the Nation", replacing the retiring Bob Schieffer this summer) raised an important point on the April 13 "Evening News" broadcast, and it goes like this:  Since 1952, only one party has won three consecutive elections.  That was the Republicans with Ronald Reagan (twice) and George H.W. Bush (once) in the 1980s.  President Obama has won twice.  Will Hillary Clinton be third time lucky for the Democrats?  Or will voters decide to give whoever represents the GOP another chance?