Is a Time Warner, NBC tie-up in the cards?
Via ReportOnBusiness
Is a Time Warner, NBC tie-up in the cards? It’s up to ‘the Jeffs’
By RICHARD SIKLOS
>EXCERPT
This is, after all, the age of recombinant media - as witnessed by the split of CBS and Viacom, the planned dismantling of IAC, the halving of Scripps and Belo, and so on. What makes NBCU and Time Warner uniquely intriguing, though, is that melding their operations fit together almost too perfectly from a strategic and cost-savings perspective. (Plus, imagine the punning possibilities if all top executives stayed involved at first - Messrs. Bewkes, Immelt, and NBCU’s CEO Jeff Zucker, aka “The Jeffs”).
What NBCU and the new Time Warner share in common is that they have made the development of cable networks and the original programming that runs on them their core competency. (And until splitting off cable, Time Warner by law is prohibited from owning a broadcast network.)
Time Warner has talked about finding a broadcast news partner and NBC News would fit that bill - though the overlap between CNN and MSNBC and CNBC would be overkill and I’d expect MSNBC to be expendable. So - if it lives to see the day - might be the CW network joint venture between Time Warner and CBS. Similarly, Mr. Bewkes might not want to keep the Universal film studio and theme parks since he already has Warner Brothers, into which he just collapsed smaller studios New Line and Picturehouse.
>Read the rest at ReportOnBusiness.
