AT&T and Time Warner: a new home for Harry Potter

US telecoms giant AT&T wants to buy entertainment conglomerate Time Warner. Investors and regulators may not be so keen, says Ben Judge.

US telecoms giant AT&T wants to buy entertainment conglomerate Time Warner. Investors and regulators may balk, says Ben Judge.

For media companies, bigger is usually seento be better, says Amie Tsang in The New York Times. That certainly seems to be the thinking behind US telecoms giant AT&T's $85bn bid to buy media conglomerate Time Warner a deal that could "reshape the entire media landscape in the United States".It would give AT&T, which in 2015 acquired satellite broadcaster DirecTV, control of HBO and CNN, plus Warner Brothers, the home of the Harry Potter films. It's a curious union, coming as it does after the "colossal failure" of Time Warner's previous merger with AOL, which chief executive Jeffrey Bewkes has "spent the last decade dismantling", says The New York Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin. But AT&T believes it can make it work.

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Ben Judge

Ben studied modern languages at London University's Queen Mary College. After dabbling unhappily in local government finance for a while, he went to work for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh. The launch of the paper's website, scotsman.com, in the early years of the dotcom craze, saw Ben move online to manage the Business and Motors channels before becoming deputy editor with responsibility for all aspects of online production for The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and the Edinburgh Evening News websites, along with the papers' Edinburgh Festivals website.

Ben joined MoneyWeek as website editor in 2008, just as the Great Financial Crisis was brewing. He has written extensively for the website and magazine, with a particular emphasis on alternative finance and fintech, including blockchain and bitcoin. 

As an early adopter of bitcoin, Ben bought when the price was under $200, but went on to spend it all on foolish fripperies.