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Corporate & Securities Law

: Antitrust Review

Government Clears Comcast-NBC Merger

By David Fischer

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Today, the FCC and DOJ (unsurprisingly) cleared the Comcast-NBC Universal merger (technically, it is a joint venture between Comcast and GE’s NBC Universal Inc. subsidiary) with some (minor) conditions. The DOJ press release states that:

Under the proposed settlement and the FCC order, the joint venture must make available to online video distributors (OVDs) the same package of broadcast and cable channels that it sells to traditional video programming distributors. In addition, the joint venture must offer an OVD broadcast, cable and film content that is similar to, or better than, the content the distributor receives from any of the joint venture?s programming peers. These peers are NBC?s broadcast competitors (ABC, CBS and FOX), the largest cable programmers (News Corp., Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.), and the largest video production studios (News Corp., Sony Corporation of America, Time Warner Inc., Viacom Inc. and The Walt Disney Co.).

In the event of a licensing dispute between the joint venture and an online video distributor, the department may seek court enforcement of the settlement or permit, in its sole discretion, the aggrieved online video distributor to pursue a commercial arbitration procedure established under the settlement. The FCC order also requires the joint venture to license content to OVDs on reasonable terms and includes an arbitration mechanism for resolving disputes. If timely arbitration is available for resolution of disputes under the FCC order, the department ordinarily will defer to the FCC?s arbitration process to resolve such disputes. The FCC order also allows Comcast?s traditional competitors, such as satellite and telephone companies, to invoke arbitration at the FCC to resolve program access and retransmission consent disputes.

The FCC has its own press release but, oddly, issues them only in pdf and Word formats (not html). There are also separate, and one joint, statements for the individual FCC Commissioners.

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Full post as published by Antitrust Review on January 18, 2011 (boomark / email).

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