- As investors look for tea leaves to read ahead of tomorrow's opening arguments in the AT&T/Time Warner antitrust trial, reports show that the Justice Dept. intends to call several of AT&T's rival firms to testify, starting with Cox Communications' Suzanne Fenwick.
- She works in Cox's content acquisition team and the company is concerned about "potential access to exclusive content" by a giant AT&T/Time Warner combination.
- Justice will also call AT&T Entertainment Chief Content Officer Dan York, the New York Post reports, and question him about alleged moves when he ran DirecTV content to discourage rivals from signing carriage deals with a Los Angeles Dodgers channel.
- A source tells the Post that the government's star witness will be controversial.
- Among others whose executives will testify, according to Judge Richard Leon: Comcast-NBCUniversal (NASDAQ:CMCSA); Charter Communications (NASDAQ:CHTR); CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL); YouTube (GOOG, GOOGL); CableOne (NYSE:CABO) and Sony (NYSE:SNE).
- AT&T (NYSE:T) is down 0.5% so far today; Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) is up 0.4%.