What the NBC/Comcast merger will mean to you

December 4, 2009 – 10:33 am – No Comment

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As many of you already know, Comcast has gone through with a deal to purchase NBC Universal. As part of the deal, Comcast will own NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, Bravo, The Weather Channel, USA Network, E!, and a host of other cable channels. It would also own NBC owned stations in New York City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas, Chicago, and Miami.

The merger doesn’t stop at TV either. It also extends to the movies where NBC has owned Universal Pictures and Focus Pictures.

You also can’t forget the internet entities that it owns such as Hulu.

With all that entertainment real estate you can expect Comcast to begin raising rates for everyone. Not only that, but for everyone who really enjoyed Hulu service for free, it will likely be something that will disappear completely in the future, not the service but the *free* part.

Another thing that will likely happen as Comcast will own so many channels, when the company sells the content to the cable stations, it will likely bundle certain “in demand” channels with other channels that aren’t so “in demand” and will charge much higher prices. The only thing that anyone can do is basically deal with it. It happened in the 1990′s when rules regarding media ownership were relaxed and the big media groups (such as NBC/Universal) began buying up all these stations. When one company (and as large as this one is, it is sure to happen) begins raising rates, then all the others follow.

Comcast already has an unfortunate reputation as a company that isn’t consumer friendly and overcharges for content. Not only that, but all their service sectors have extremely poor reviews all across the internet.

Hopefully things won’t get too bad after the merger is complete. However, that is an extremely optimistic view due to the way Comcast already runs its business.