Comcast Adds Another Piece in Media Plan

Three weeks ago, Comcast unveiled plans to build an addition to its headquarters, a gleaming steel-and-glass tower designed by the renowned architect Norman Foster that will cast a shadow over downtown Philadelphia.

With its proposed $45 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable, the company could do much the same over the media and telecommunications landscape.

The deal, announced on Thursday, solidifies Comcast’s reputation as an enterprise with grand, even audacious, ambitions. Begun 51 years ago with just 1,200 subscribers in northern Mississippi, Comcast has grown into a giant conglomerate that now has one foot in the broadband and cable businesses and another in content, thanks to its ownership of NBCUniversal.

Its competitors now include companies as varied as Verizon in broadband and the Walt Disney Company in entertainment, and with a market capitalization of $138 billion it is bigger than either, and more diverse.

“I don’t know of a company that has the combination of assets that Comcast has,” said John Doerr, the prominent venture capitalist. “It’s a well-integrated suite. That’s where the world is headed.”

The deal to acquire Time Warner Cable â€" completed in just a week â€" is certain to face scrutiny from the government and opposition from consumer groups. But if approved, it will make Comcast a national player, adding millions of subscribers in major markets like New York City, Dallas and Los Angeles.

Investors expressed some skepticism, sending Comcast shares down 4 percent in trading Thursday. Some think that Comcast may have overpaid in the deal. In addition, Comcast faces the challenge of successfully managing large, sometimes unwieldy components â€" much the way Time Warner did when it owned AOL, Time Warner Cable and an array of other assets.

But analysts generally praised the deal. Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG who had predicted that Comcast would eventually arrive as a buyer, said the transaction would pay off in the long term.

“It’s too transformative a deal to pass up,” Mr. Greenfield said. “It shows recognition of a rapidly changing landscape.”

The move further establishes the reputation of Comcast’s chief executive, Brian L. Roberts, as a daring deal maker with expansive ambitions. A soft-spoken 54-year-old, he lacks the outsize personality of an executive like Rupert Murdoch but has nevertheless become an influential mogul, with power centers in both Philadelphia and Manhattan’s 30 Rockefeller Center. His company reported $6.8 billion in profit on $64.7 billion in revenue last year.

Mr. Roberts, whose father, Ralph, founded the company in 1963, has deep roots in the cable industry. He spent some of his teenage years as an intern answering service calls and repairing cables. But over time, he developed what analysts and friends call a sharp mind and a killer instinct, unafraid to pursue high-priced takeovers.

“Fifteen years ago, a lot of cable entrepreneurs of my dad’s generation began selling their companies and we wanted to buy,” Mr. Roberts said in a telephone interview. “We wanted to create a company that was sustainable.”

Behind the approximately $100 billion in deals that he has overseen has been a belief that the company could compete across a variety of platforms with Verizon, AT&T and DirecTV. And he foresaw the importance of high-speed data early on, according to Mr. Doerr, who became friends with Mr. Roberts in the 1990s.

Mr. Roberts recalled that when Bill Gates invested $1 billion in his company in 1997, the Microsoft billionaire told him that data would be a bigger business than video one day.

“I didn’t know what he was talking about then, but he was right,” Mr. Roberts said.

Over the years, Mr. Roberts assembled a management team that has won praise for its acumen, including Neil Smit, the former Navy SEAL who will oversee Comcast’s expanded cable businesses, and Michael Angelakis who, as Comcast’s chief financial officer, oversaw the negotiations with Time Warner Cable.

On the team is Stephen Burke, who left Disney 16 years ago to join Comcast when it was still a small-time player in the cable industry. He has since become the head of NBCUniversal.

“I had a lot of people sort of scratch their heads and say, ‘Why would you go to a little regional cable company?’ ” Mr. Burke said in an interview. “I went because I was convinced at the time â€" and I was right, more right than I knew â€" that Brian wanted to create the next great American media company. “

Mr. Roberts has long been a top negotiator in his company’s deals. Mr. Doerr, a top partner at the investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, recalled negotiating against his friend in a broadband deal in the late 1990s. He said he needed to take a nap under a table late one night while Mr. Roberts kept going.

But it was the acquisition of AT&T’s cable business for $47 billion 13 years ago â€" beating rivals like Time Warner in the process and becoming the country’s biggest cable provider â€" that first revealed the scope of Comcast’s ambitions.

“Once we got big in distribution, we looked at people like Rupert Murdoch and John Malone and just felt in our bones that content and distribution together worked well,” Mr. Burke said. “So once we were of size on the cable side, we turned to look to a content company to buy.”

The next deal was even bolder, but ended badly: In 2004, Comcast made an ill-advised bid to acquire Disney for $54 billion, setting off a revolt among its shareholders, forcing Mr. Roberts to admit defeat and bide his time for another media property.

A secret meeting on an Idaho golf course in summer 2009 provided that avenue. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s chief executive, told Mr. Burke and Ralph Roberts that G.E. was willing to part with NBCUniversal. Months later, Comcast announced a deal to take control of the NBC media empire.

The acquisition satisfied Mr. Roberts’s urge to plant a flag among the major media companies. But it did not tamp down his instinct for pushing Comcast to stay ahead of the technological changes roiling the industry. Those changes only further stimulated Mr. Roberts’s natural inclinations to expand and tinker.

Comcast still lacked the national cable presence that Verizon and AT&T had, limiting how broadly it could promote new media services like advanced video on demand. The company’s management seemed in no rush to take that next step, but when Time Warner Cable finally called upon its rival for help in fending off a hostile bid by Charter Communications, Mr. Roberts and his team struck, quietly negotiating the deal in less than a week.

Comcast has shown few signs of sitting still. Last month, the company suggested that it planned to team with a utility to sell electricity in Pennsylvania. And it has already begun offering home security and automation through its Xfinity services.

“I don’t think of it as a cable company anymore,” Mr. Doerr said.

A version of this article appears in print on 02/14/2014, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Comcast Path: Daring Deals To Add Reach .