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New Owners For Charter Cable?

The cable company serving Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky could get its third owner in two years if Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group Corp. succeeds in buying Charter Communications.

 

St. Louis-based Charter merged with Time Warner last year, after Comcast's attempt to buy Time Warner fell through, and rebranded the residential cable system as Spectrum. 

 

Bloomberg reports that Masayoshi Son, SoftBank chairman, "is now mustering an offer from SoftBank to buy Charter outright" after "Charter on Sunday rebuffed his proposal to combine the company with Sprint Corp., which SoftBank controls."

 

Son "intends to make the offer this week," Bloomberg says.

As I reported last year,  Charter acquired Time Warner Cable for $78 billion in 2016.

 

The Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Time Warner systems had been in play for two years.

Under the failed 2014 merger of Comcast (No. 1 US cable operator) and Time Warner (No. 2), Charter was going to buy Time Warner systems in Ohio and Kentucky, including Greater Cincinnati, Southwestern Ohio and Northern Kentucky. When the Comcast deal fell through in 2015, Charter announced plans to buy Time Warner.

Stay tuned.

Copyright 2021 91.7 WVXU. To see more, visit .

John Kiesewetter joined the WVXU news team as a TV/Media blogger on July 1 2015, after nearly 30 years covering local and national broadcasting for The Cincinnati Enquirer. He’ll be posting news about Greater Cincinnati TV, radio and movies; updating your favorite former local TV/radio personalities or stars who grew up here; and breaking news about national TV, radio and media trends. You’ll also learn about Cincinnati’s rich broadcasting history.