U.S. HISPANIC
Economic study presented by ACA reveals Comcast-NBCU merge will be costly for the consumer
Maribel Ramos-Weiner| 11 de noviembre de 2010
Polka: se corre el riesgo de destruir la competencia efectiva en el mercado de distribución de TV paga
In a new economic study released earlier this week, the American Cable Association (ACA) found that consumers over the next nine years will pay at least $2.4 billion more for pay-television service as a result of unrestrained pricing power that will flow from the combination of Comcast Corp. and NBC Universal, an unprecedented media transaction awaiting regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice.”It is clear that the Comcast-NBCU deal will send monthly cable bills higher by billions of dollars over the next decade, underscoring ACA’s view that regulators must protect consumers and competition from a transaction whose benefits are vastly outweighed by its harms. Without meaningful and cost effective conditions on the Comcast-NBCU transaction, regulators also run the risk of crippling effective competition in the pay-TV distribution market,” said Matt M. Polka, ACA President and CEO.ACA’s study was conducted by Dr. William Rogerson, professor of economics at Northwestern University, who served as the FCC’s Chief Economist for the 1998-99 academic year. Rogerson’s study concluded that the transaction will allow Comcast-NBCU to raise programming fees way above levels the two would be able to command as separate and independent companies, and that these fee increases will largely be passed through to subscribers in the form of higher subscription prices. According to Rogerson, the quantifiable consumer harm of the transaction ($2.566 billion) is more than 10 times greater than the quantifiable consumer benefit ($204 million) claimed by Comcast-NBCU.
