Charter “Committed” to Bringing Back Dodgers Games: Report

Charter customers in Glendale, Burbank, Malibu, Long Beach and other areas will have access to SportsNetLA within a few weeks, the company's chief exec told the LA Times

Charter Communications will soon offer the Los Angeles Dodgers' TV channel in a move that would end a yearlong stalemate over distribution of the channel and allow thousands of subscribers to view the team's games.

The company, which announced an agreement Tuesday to purchase Time Warner Cable in a $56.7-billion deal that would make it the largest pay-TV provider in Southern California, is "committed" to bringing the Dodgers game to thousands of fan who have not been able to watch their favorite team on television, Charter Communications Chief Executive Tom Rutledge told the Los Angeles Times.

Fans in Glendale, Malibu, Burbank, La Canada Flintridge, Long Beach and other areas currently served by Charter would be able to watch Dodgers games on SportsNet LA. Time Warner Cable has been the only major distributor to carry the network since it began broadcasting at the start of the 2014 baseball season.

Other pay-TV providers refused to carry the channel due to what they described as high fees.

Charter customers in Glendale, Burbank, Malibu, Long Beach and other areas will have access to SportsNetLA within a few weeks, Rutledge told the Times.

The deal announced Tuesday would give Charter, backed by cable pioneer John Malone's Liberty Media Corp., a sizable footprint in Southern California, with more than 2 million customers in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, according to The Times. Charter also is planning to purchase Bright House Networks, a smaller cable provider, producing a new company with 23.9 million subscribers in 41 states.

Rutledge will run the consolidated company. The deal will need federal and state government approval but is considered more likely to pass muster with regulators than Comcast Corp.'s recent abortive effort to acquire Time Warner Cable.

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The combined company would be far smaller, with 17 million customers nationwide, according to the Los Angeles Times. Had Comcast succeeded, it would have served 30 million households.

Comcast owns NBC Universal, which is the parent company of CNBC, NBC News and this site.

In a statement Tuesday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said that the FCC weighs every merger on its own to see if it will be in the public interest, and that "an absence of harm is not sufficient." He said the FCC "will look to see how American consumers would benefit" from the deal.

"One has to be sober about genuine risks that this deal could still be rejected," said MoffettNathanson's Craig Moffett in a research note Tuesday, given the number of Internet and TV subscribers involved.

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