European firm buys Cablevision

European firm Altice will buy Cablevision, the company confirmed Thursday, creating the fourth-largest cable operator in the country and further consolidating the cable business.

Altice will pay $17.7 billion to buy Cablevision from the Dolan family, which also owns Madison Square Garden. As part of the deal, Altice will buy Newsday, amNewYork and News 12 Networks, a local news channel.

The company previously acquired a smaller operator, Suddenlink.

{mosads}New York-based Cablevision serves more than 3.1 million customers across its business, Altice said in a release. The company presented the acquisition as key to their larger strategy in the United States.

“The strategy of Altice in the large and highly strategic US market is reinforced with the acquisition of Cablevision,” said Patrick Drahi, the president of Altice, in a statement. “We will be in a stronger position, as in all other markets in which we operate, to deliver the best services, invest in the most advanced technology and develop innovative products for the benefit of our customers.”

The company said it expects the deal to close in the first half of 2016, once regulators have the chance to review and approve it.

The acquisition is the second large cable deal this year, after Charter Communications’s $56.7 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable and its $10.4 billion acquisition of a smaller operator, Brighthouse Networks. In another pay-TV deal, AT&T completed its acquisition of DirecTV.

The spate of mergers and acquisitions comes as the cable industry confronts changes in the ways that people consume video content. Pay-TV companies are looking to preserve their revenues as services such as Netflix deliver television and movies to consumers without any tie to their television package.