[AnotherUnixGeek]

I doubt the NFL cares one way or another how this will effect some merger, although now they do know DirecTV has a major reason to keep the status quo so expect the price to go up a lot.

Depends on the market, and the merger does remove a potential competitive bid for the next Sunday Ticket negotiation. But I didn't mean that the NFL cares about overall competition in the US TV market - just that it could be a useful, unintended side effect of their own considerations.

[discostu]

Not really. The NFL has always wanted to have it limited in its American availability (the networks pay the league a lot of money, and the league doesn’t want to devalue those). And really this merger isn’t that big, DirecTV talks a big game, but they only have 20 million subscribers nationally. All this “anti-competition” monopoly talk is kind of silly. The big question is why is AT&T willing to fork over so much cash for this? I think it’s hardware more than anything.