Enlarge / AT&T will own a bunch of new media properties if it is allowed to buy Time Warner. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Some news organizations have reported that Time Warner has only one FCC license, for a TV station in Atlanta, and that the AT&T/Time Warner merger wouldn’t be reviewed by the FCC if Time Warner sells that TV station to a third party. That is not correct, however. Time Warner programmers such as HBO, CNN, and Turner Broadcasting System also have dozens of FCC licenses that let them upload video to satellites used by pay-TV companies.

These licenses are crucial for distributing video to cable TV providers. It isn’t only satellite TV companies like Dish or the AT&T-owned DirecTV that use satellites to send programmers’ video to consumers’ homes—even cable companies like Comcast use what’s called a “headend in the sky” to receive and distribute video.