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On Friday, cable companies Charter Communications and Cox Communications announced that theyve agreed to merge. Charter will acquire Cox in a deal valued at $34.5 billion. This is one of the biggest deals of the year. Charter, known more widely by its brand Spectrum, is one of the largest television communications operators in the country. The proposed transaction will result in Charter acquiring Coxs commercial fiber and managed IT and cloud businesses, and Cox will contribute its residential cable business to Charter. The joint press release noted that the merger will create an industry leader in mobile and broadband communications services, seamless video entertainment, and high-quality customer service delivering powerful benefits for American employees, customers, communities, and shareholders. Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said, This combination will augment our ability to innovate and provide high-quality, competitively priced products, delivered with outstanding customer service, to millions of homes and businesses. Cox will own around 23% of the combined entitys fully diluted shares, the companies said. As part of the deal, the combined entity will assume Coxs estimated $12 billion in outstanding debt. Charter (NYSE: CHTR) stock was up around 2.58% in early trading on Friday. Cox is a privately held company. Heres what to expect from the merger The deal is expected to close at the same time as the previously announced Liberty Broadband merger. The combined company will change its name to Cox Communications within a year of the deal closing. Spectrum will become the consumer-facing brand in the areas currently served by Cox. Winfrey will continue to serve as CEO. The combined company will remain headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, and plans to maintain a significant presence at Coxs campus in Atlanta. Cable companies struggle to retain pay-TV subscribers Why is this strategic merger being announced? Cable companies have experienced dwindling pay-TV subscriber rates as customers cut the cord by canceling cable subscriptions and switching to streaming services. As a result, the industry has invested heavily in broadband and mobile. According to the latest cord-cutting monitor report from analyst firm MoffettNathanson, Charter has continued to lose pay-TV customers along with the rest of the industry. In Q4 of 2024, the cable giant lost 123,000 cable subscribers. Collectively, the cable industry is expected to continue to shed pay-TV subscribers in the coming years, declining from 67.7 million subscribers at the end of last year to 51.5 million by 2028, according to MoffettNathansons projections. The firm says the growth of streaming services that replicate the cable bundle won’t be enough to offset the downward trend. Charter will acquire Coxs existing six million subscribers if the deal closes as planned. The planned merger awaits approval from Charter shareholders and regulators. The proposed deal will further test regulators’ appetite for large mergers in the Trump era. A decade ago, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (TWC) abandoned their proposed $45.2 billion combination amid concerns from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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E-Commerce
Midway while sailing across the Pacific with just his cat named Phoenix, Oliver Widger reflected on why he thinks his many followersmore than a million on TikTok and Instagramare drawn to his story of quitting his 9-to-5 job and embarking on a journey from Oregon to Hawaii.“The world kind of sucks and, like, I don’t think I’m alone in how I felt with my work,” Widger, 29, told The Associated Press on Wednesday via Zoom. “You can be making $150,000 a year and you still feel like you’re just making ends meet, you know what I mean? And I think people are just tired of that and working really hard for nothing and want a way out.”People are inspired by someone who found a way out, said Widger, who is among a growing number of people who have undertaken such voyages in recent years.Being diagnosed four years ago with a syndrome that carried a risk of paralysis made him realize he hated his job as a manager at a tire company, a job requiring him to be clean-shaven and wear pressed shirts. He heard about people who sailed from California to Hawaii and decided that was the life for him.He abruptly quit his job with “no money, no plan” and $10,000 of debt.“I knew one thing: I’m buying a sailboat,” he recalled. “I’m sailing around the world.”He liquidated his retirement savings, taught himself to sail mostly via YouTube and moved from Portland to the Oregon coast, where he spent months refitting the $50,000 boat he bought.Now, Widger is harnessing the power of social media to fund his round-the-world sailing dream.Since he set sail in April, followers have been tuning into his “Sailing with Phoenix” social media posts to view videos of him and his feline first mate battling the waves and bouts of seasickness, enjoying dazzling sunsets, recounting tricky boat repairs or just reflecting on life at sea.As he discussed his journey with the AP, a netted bag carrying bottled water and snacks swung wildly over his head as the boat rocked.He recalled highlights of the voyage so far, including marveling at the speed dolphins cut through the water and finding flying fish on the deck. There have been stretches when there were no birds in sight for days. It can be a struggle to sleep when the boat is creaking while being buffeted by waves or to steady a boiling pot for the MREs he has been subsisting on.There have been harrowing moments like when a rudder failed and the boat tilted sideways in the surf for three hours as he made repairs, and the time he locked himself in the engine compartment and pried his way out with a wrench.Widger acknowledged he is relatively inexperienced as a sailor, but he has implemented safety measures and communication backup plans, including a satellite phone and an emergency beacon.Lt. Cmdr. Jesse Harms of the U.S. Coast Guard in Hawaii hasn’t been following the journey closely, but said he is relieved to hear Widger has the Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, known as an EPIRB.It’s a critical tool for rescuers to locate a mariner’s position during an emergency, especially in the Pacific, the largest ocean, Harms said.Widger’s journey provides a good opportunity to educate the public about sailing safety, such as the importance of wearing a personal flotation device whenever topside on the boat, monitoring the weather closely and registering emergency tools like the EPIRB, Harms said.“That’s a really critical piece for anybody that’s getting motivated by his story to go set off on their own adventure,” Harms said.Until his arrival, likely in Honolulu, Widger is making sure everything is in place to avoid Phoenix having to undergo Hawaii’s animal quarantine. A mobile vet will sign off on Phoenix’s health when they arrive, he said.Widger wasn’t aware of the deadly danger of cat feces to the endangered Hawaiian monk seal, but he has been keeping all his trash, including kitty litter, on board. Even though he said he is legally allowed to throw it overboard, seeing so much plastic in the ocean motivates him not to.In addition to managing the practicalities of daily life on a boat, he is coping with going viral in the middle of the ocean by creating social media content and making decisions about merch his fans want to buy.He credits it all to his neck issue, which “shook up my world and it changed my perspective on everything.” He also hopes he can be an inspiration for anyone who’s in a rut.“Everything I’ve done I thought was impossible,” Widger said. “Sailing around the world is such a ridiculous dream. Whatever your dream is, just go, just do it.” Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The internet wouldn’t be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip.Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system, and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021.A new book, Like: The Button That Changed The World, delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that’s become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society.It’s a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp cofounder Russ Simmons, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free.As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson’s suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the “useful,” “funny,” and “cool” buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book. This image provided by BCG shows a sketch by Bob Goodson that included a crude concept of what would become the Like button on May 18, 2005. [Photo: BCG via AP] “It’s something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, ‘I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,’ ” Reeves said during an interview with the Associated Press. “But it’s very hard to answer the simple question, ‘Well, who invented the Like button?'” The social wellspring behind a social symbol Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn’t invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009five years after the social network’s creation in a Harvard University dorm room. As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.“Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it’s less so now,” Reeves said. “Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.”The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn’t require a lot of hoops to navigate Hollywood’s role in the Like button’s saga And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn’t come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, “Gladiator,” where Emperor Commodusportrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenixused the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena.But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, “Happy Days.” The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Nota site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselvesbegan playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book’s research.Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo. The button’s big breakthrough But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn’t happen.By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, “is he didn’t actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.”But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007.But the button wasn’t successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like buttononly after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button “because nothing is more awesome than awesome,” according to the book’s research.Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people’s individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform’s $165 billion in revenuelast year. The button’s success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions”love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.”Facebook hasn’t publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book’s authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. “What content is liked by humansis probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,” Levchin said in the book.The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because “if you can’t even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?”Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human.“We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,” Reeves said. “And I don’t think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it’s the product of 100,000 years of evolution.” Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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