Cable Management Ireland, the cable TV company, is on the brink of being sold. It emerged last night that NTL, which was expected to purchase Cable Management (CMI), is not to be the buyer, leading to intense speculation that the owners of Princes Holdings will buy the smaller company and integrate the two networks to provide a major competitor to NTL.

CMI has more than 60,000 subscribers in north Co Dublin and several other commuter towns around the greater Dublin region. Due to its proximity to the Cablelink network bought by NTL for £535 million (€680 million) it had been expected that it would buy CMI and it is understood that NTL had held lengthy negotiations with the Irish company.

However, it is now understood that NTL is no longer in the running, leaving Princes as the likely new owner. The likely structure of the deal is not clear, as Princes is jointed owned by US cable company TCI and Independent News & Media. As reported previously in The Irish Times, on the basis of the price paid for Cablelink, the likely purchase price for CMI should be about £80-£90 million. The main shareholders in the company are two British venture funds, but CMI management is thought to hold around 25 per cent.

Whichever entity emerges as CMI's new shareholder, it seems clear that its network will be merged with Princes, creating two large players in the industry which will now both have to invest heavily to provide new multimedia services to customers down their cable networks.

Given the recent expansion in the British cable industry of Telewest - in which TCI has a substantial stake - CMI and Princes combined would fit in to a large UK/Irish portfolio of cable interests in which TCI has a stake.

Princes is the second largest TV relay company in the Republic with around 150,000 customers, of which about 80,000 are on the MMDS system.