Comcast CEO: "Today, We Move On"

Brian Roberts

After months of fighting the headwinds of fierce opposition, Comcast has bowed to the inevitable and withdrawn its $45.2 billion merger agreement with Time Warner Cable, according to Variety.

“Today, we move on,” Comcast chairman-CEO Brian Roberts said in a statement Friday. “Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away.

Comcast’s retreat on Time Warner Cable will have ripple effects across the landscape of cable and broadband providers.

Charter Communications had struck a complicated agreement with Comcast to acquire 3.9 million subscribers as a result of divestitures that Comcast and Time Warner Cable planned in order to make the deal more palatable to regulators. Charter cut the deal as a consolation prize after being outmaneuvered in the bidding for TW Cable in early 2014.

More recently, Charter struck another cable acquisition deal, for Bright House Networks, that was contingent on Comcast and TW Cable tying the knot. Bright House has long been managed by TW Cable, an arrangement that would have ended if the Comcast deal had closed.

Wall Street analysts say Charter, in which cable mogul John Malone has a 25% interest, will be in a stronger position to make another run at TW Cable because its stock price is up and operations have strengthened. TW Cable resisted the unsolicited bid that Charter launched in mid-2013, calling it “grossly inadequate.”

Read More Now