Comcast couldn’t mollify Wall Street about its pending deal to buy NBC Universal this morning, because it refused to talk about the deal at all. The company did spend time, though, explaining the peril and possibilities that Web video poses for the cable giant.
Yesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.
News Corp. is reportedly interested in purchasing the Travel Channel from Cox for something like $800 million. Here’s one way to help pay for a small piece of that deal: Sell off Fuel TV, its modest surf, skate and snowboard-themed cable channel.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt couldn’t be any clearer: He’s been saying, over and over, that he thinks the recession is in his company’s rear-view mirror. And Wall Street has been listening: It has been steadily pushing up the search giant’s shares for months. Today we get to find out just how good Google’s growth story is.
What’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.
That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”
Just in case anyone thought Time Warner had any lingering interest in NBC Universal, this ought to put it to rest: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes just compared the proposed Comcast/NBCU deal with the disastrous one his company made with AOL nearly a decade ago.
Maybe this is why Comcast rushed to knock down a story that said it bought NBC Universal from GE: It knew Wall Street would hate the idea.
More upbeat–but not too ecstatic–chatter about the state of the Internet advertising market this morning from Wall Street: Barclays Capital analyst Douglas Anmuth is raising his estimates for Google, citing “improving macro conditions [and] a stronger ad market.” Other online advertising bulls: Investors, who have been pushing up Google stock for months, and CEO Eric Schmidt, who has declared that the worst is over.
CEO Carol Bartz explains what Yahoo is getting for its $100 million ad campaign, its first global marketing effort, which was launched today in New York during Advertising Week.
Here’s the rundown of Bartz’s press conference on the branding blowout.
Even when the M&A market was shut down, Wall Street couldn’t stop speculating about GE’s intentions for its NBC Universal unit. And now that it’s deal-making time again, the chatter is getting very noisy.
Hence the flurry of coverage over yesterday’s remarks by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, in which he said…not very much.
The announcement from RealNetworks that Apple had approved its iPhone app–all you can eat music, to go, for $15 a month–gave the company’s stock a brief jolt yesterday. That’s over now: Wall Street seems to have thought about it and concluded that people won’t pay a monthly fee for music, even on an iPhone.
Conventional wisdom of the day: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner, the man who made his mark with Rolling Stone in the 60s and 70s, and then again with US Weekly in this decade, has blown it on the Web. And now it’s too late for him to catch up.
And who knows? It may even be true. But here’s one bit of nuance to chew on: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner has made money–as in, a profit–on the Web for the last five years.
Google famously doesn’t give “guidance” to Wall Street analysts. But starting next month, the company will be giving them lessons via a series of “educational webcasts for investors and financial analysts.”
Best case scenario: This could be a huge help to people who pay attention to the search giant for a living but who remain baffled about some of the most basic parts of its business. So if you know anyone like that (ahem), make sure he tunes in.
When videogame sales tank, what happens to sales at the world’s biggest videogame retailer? The answer shouldn’t be a surprise, but somehow the performance that Gamestop put in this morning managed to catch Wall Street off guard anyway.
Economists may be declaring that the recession is over, but declarations won’t do much for media businesses that have seen their ad dollars disappear. But here’s a bit of (very) cautiously optimistic news for them: Two reports from Wall Street research shop Sanford Bernstein noting the mildest of turnarounds.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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