Check your TV listings, it appears it’s time for media consolidation to begin.
AT&T got a clear signal from Time Warner on Friday that it wanted to complete a deal for $110 per share, or $85 billion, according to a report.
An official announcement is expected as soon as Sunday, when the Time Warner board OK a 50/50 cash and stock deal, the report said.
“This is a peak moment for media; they are never going to have the value they have today,” one media banker told The Post.
Time Warner shares closed up 7.8 percent, to $89.48 — and gained another 4 percent in after-hours trading on the news.
In just the last two weeks, CBS and Viacom hired professionals to weigh a merger of those two media companies.
With news of the AT&T-Time Warner talks ricocheting around Wall Street and the expectation that the consolidation game is just starting, the stocks of several media companies posted sharp gains, including Discovery Communications, up 3.6 percent, 21st Century Fox, up 2.2 percent, and Scripps Networks Interactive, up 5.6 percent.
The Street didn’t feel the same warmth for AT&T, as investors pushed its shares down 3 percent, to $37.49.
For Time Warner, the expected pact with the phone company caps two years of speculation about into whose arms the media company would fall.
Yet again, the major tech players failed to bite on a media asset while telecom giants swooped in.
Apple, as The Post reported exclusively earlier this year, took a look at Time Warner but didn’t advance beyond first base.
AT&T bought DirecTV a year ago for $48.5 billion, while rival Verizon acquired AOL — and is buying Yahoo.
Separately, eyes are also on Sprint, which may tap its backer SoftBank’s $100 billion tech fund to pay for expansion in the entertainment sector.
Jeff Bewkes’ Time Warner has been slimming down over the past two years to make it more palatable to potential buyers.
In January, The Post reported that the newly svelte media heavyweight had, at the time, attracted the attention of not only Apple and AT&T — but the unwelcome gaze of a host of activists pushing a sale.
In 2014, Time Warner turned down an $85-per-share offer from Fox.
Time Warner was trading at around $79 a share before Bloomberg reported first the advanced AT&T-Time Warner talks.
AT&T is highly leveraged, with $120 billion in debt on its balance sheet. “They’re buying it for [program] rights,” said a source familiar with AT&T. “They need it” to fill out its DirecTV distribution system.
The move raises questions about a possible Disney-Netflix tie-up.
In a Q&A session recently, Disney boss Bob Iger noted, “It’s almost not enough to have all that stuff unless you have access to your consumer.”
The expected AT&T-Time Warner tie-up began with the telecom looking only at a possible Warner Bros. acquisition.
But then talks widened to a possible deal for the entire company, sources said.