Comcast Corp. CMCSA -0.70% and Time Warner Cable Inc. are slated to sit down for the first time on Wednesday with Justice Department officials to discuss potential remedies in hopes of keeping their $45.2 billion merger on track, according to people familiar with the matter.

The parties haven’t met face-to-face to hash out possible concessions in the more than 14 months since the deal was announced.

Staffers at both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission remain concerned a combined company would wield too much power in the broadband Internet market and give it unfair competitive leverage against TV channel owners and new market entrants that offer video programming online, said people with knowledge of the review.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable are working to keep the $45.2 billion deal alive despite reservations from the FCC and the Department of Justice. WSJ’s Brent Kendall joins MoneyBeat. Photo: Getty

One of the options that the FCC is considering is to designate the merger for a hearing, people familiar with the agency’s thinking said. A hearing order would put the merger in the hands of an administrative law judge, a move which would be seen as a sign that the FCC isn’t convinced the deal would be good for the public.

“Mergers are never put to hearing in order to approve them,” said Robert McDowell, a former Republican FCC commissioner. “They are designated for a hearing in order to kill them.”

Combining the nation’s two largest cable and Internet providers would create a company with control over roughly 30% of the pay-TV market and 57% of the market for broadband service, now defined by the FCC as 25 megabits-per-second speeds and above. The companies have presented the deal as a straightforward cable merger that doesn’t reduce consumer choice since cable operators don’t overlap geographically, but the increased market share in broadband Internet has been under more intense scrutiny, people familiar with the reviews have said.

Comcast has argued that the Time Warner Cable deal isn’t anticompetitive and is necessary for the company to compete against an array of emerging threats to the traditional pay-TV model, including technology competitors like Apple Inc. and Netflix Inc. “We continue to believe that our transaction with Time Warner Cable will bring substantial benefits to consumers without any competitive harms,” Comcast spokeswoman Sena Fitzmaurice said in a statement. “We will continue to engage in our productive discussions with the government and do not see any value in commenting on rumors and speculation.”

The Justice Department, which evaluates antitrust concerns, and the FCC, which must decide if the deal is in the public interest, are nearing the final stages of scrutinizing the acquisition. Both agencies are continuing to ask media companies for more information regarding their dealings with Comcast, people familiar with the talks said. Discussions on potential remedies would be an indication that the agencies haven’t yet made a firm or final decision on the merger.

The Wednesday meeting with antitrust officials could be the first of many, but it isn’t clear whether the companies can offer concessions that will satisfy regulators.

Looming over any discussion about merger remedies will be the concessions Comcast made in 2011 to win approval to acquire control of NBCUniversal. People familiar with the current review process say the Justice Department and the FCC have been examining whether Comcast has fully complied with those earlier commitments.

Specifically, the Justice Department is looking closely at Comcast’s role in Hulu, the streaming service it became a part owner of through the NBCUniversal purchase, people familiar with the matter said. In return for approval of the NBCUniversal takeover, Comcast agreed to have no management role in Hulu and be a silent partner.

The department is said to have asked questions in the past few weeks about that arrangement, particularly with regard to the aborted effort by co-owners Walt Disney Co. and 21st Century Fox Inc. to sell Hulu in 2013. Comcast rivals DirecTV and AT&T Inc. were among the bidders at the time. Hulu ended up being taken off the sale block. (News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, and 21st Century Fox were until mid-2013 part of the same company.)

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment. An FCC spokesman declined to comment.

Staff attorneys at the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division were leaning toward a recommendation to block the acquisition, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people close to the matter. The attorneys could submit their recommendation as soon as this week, according to the report. Such input by department staffers marks an initial milepost in the final decision-making process. Senior Justice Department officials will be the ones to decide whether to challenge the transaction.

One potential concession that could be up for discussion is the divestiture of more of the roughly 30 million customers the combined company will serve if the deal closes. The companies have already agreed to deals with Charter Communications Inc. to sell or spin off systems serving 3.9 million customers if the Time Warner Cable purchase is completed.

Another factor is the FCC’s decision to impose utility-style regulations on Internet service earlier this year to make sure broadband providers treat all Web traffic equally. If regulators require Comcast to live under the new “net neutrality” policies regardless of whether they are held up in court to win deal approval, Comcast may walk away from the acquisition, people familiar with the matter said. Comcast wouldn’t owe Time Warner Cable any breakup fee if it were to abandon the deal.

Comcast’s planned purchase of Time Warner Cable has been dogged by regulatory delays, and the most recent expected closing date was bumped to the middle of the year. Meanwhile, Wall Street has remained cautious about the potential for the deal to be approved. After Bloomberg’s report, Time Warner Cable shares fell 5.4% to $149.61 on Friday, and Comcast slipped 2.1%. The stock drop left Time Warner Cable trading 11% below the value of Comcast’s all-stock bid, signaling skepticism among traders that the deal will close.

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at shalini.ramachandran@wsj.com, Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com