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Comcast Wants To Buy Disney For $66 Billion
BenBenBen writes "Comcast have made a surprise $66 billion bid for Disney. The public bid (aimed at swaying shareholders) follows a period of secret negotiation which resulted in Eisner saying no.
Comcast has a statement on their website and there is better coverage available here."
ISP buys media giant. ISP tries to merge businesses. ISP fails. ISP discards its name and adopts media giant's name. Stock plummets.
What is your Slash Rating?
Reading your post, I wish that the moderation system had a "+1 Scary".
I doubt it will happen though. Some terminal systems may come that are nothing but internet-enabled TVs, but I doubt that anyone will manage to move the internet away from the basic protocols, which allow us all to create our own applications, and not just sit around waiting for the corporations to do it for us.
Nicholas Negroponte wrote about the distinction between Bits and Atoms in his 1995 book Being Digital. The traditional content distibutors are struggling with the transition from distributing information as physical objects or "atoms" to distributing information on the Internet or as "bits."
The entertainment company that figures out how to profit from distributing bits without treating its customers as criminals will be extremely profitable. The proposed merger of Comcast and Disney would create a company that can combine a large library of content usually distributed as atoms with a high speed network that can deliver this content as bits.
Whenever I read discussions about the control of information on the Internet, I think of I.F. Stone's quote "Freedom of the press is the right to own one." The Internet gives everyone that ability to own their own digital press. No single government will be able to put the Internet genie back inthe bottle. Anyone who can access a host computer that is hosted in a free society can set up their own free press on the Internet.
Only wimps worry about cash! Just look at the mighty Worldcom/MCI and how they built their empire without cash or income. Buy up competitors, strip their support staff to nothing, and use them as collateral for the next aquistion, that's the way you do it!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I always hate posts like this.
Slashdot and thousands of communities like it still exist today, and there is no sign that they are on the decline. Come to me when they start collapsing.
Generally, we are clever enough to work around such problems.
Sure, the Internet can be used like a TV, but I dont see the other services vanishing because of that fact.
no
One reason for the increase in cable bills is the cost of programming, especially for the ESPN sports channels. ESPN is owned by Disney.
Also, this bid is a reaction to Murdoch's putting together his Fox channels with DirectTV.
Steve Jobs owns MSFT? I doubt that. I think you meant Steve Balmer, mate.
See for yourself.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
"this seems like a lot of money for a chain of shops, a few theme parks and a stack of about-to-go-out-of-copyright cartoon characters."
Don't forget ABC and ESPN. Those are probably of more interest to Comcast than cartoons and theme parks.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
they argue about regulation of the cable industry when they cry about razor thin profits.. then they BUY DISNEY?
cable companies are as weird a governmental supplied monopoly as baseball.. they have far to much a stranglehold over their individual market, and not enough oversight...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I think it is interesting to take a look at what happened to the XBOX. It is basically the system you're describing as "x86 or PPC CPUs, hard drives, etc." and it got modded all over the place. People today are using it for viewing copied movies, DVDs from all regions, general media center and a lot of other stuff. Things it was never meant to do!
:D
I don't see the big corporations taking over as long as this can happen... And "Yay!" to that!
Comcast is totally whacked evil monopoly that has no respect for their customers and spending $100 for tv and internet from them is even more whacked. I can't believe people find $100+ an acceptable monthly utility bill. What other bill do you have that even comes close to this? Phone, Food and Electricity are essential, tv and interet are NOT.
I pay $12 a month for broadcast and another $20 for dial up. That's it. If I lived in the city I wouldn't even pay the $12 for broadcast stations. Comcast is a monopoly that produces absolutley NOTHING except migraine headaches from any poor sap even attempting to contact them. F Comcast!
You hit the nail on the head. Politicians love to talk about education but it is the last thing any government really wants. An uneducated population is so much easier to control. Stick them in front of American Idol and all of a sudden all of life's problems dissapear. Why do you think it was illegal to teach a slave to read? Perhaps it is because once they realized that they are just as smart (and in most cases probably smarter) than their owner they would want to escape. Beware the day when the average person starts to realize that he is just as smart if not smarter than the politicians.
Face it Disney hasn't been "Disney" for close to 20 years. So, it really doesn't matter...
Political correctness is the newest form of slavery.
Takes nerve and madness, cable companies want something stable. At some point the execs can't take the volitility of the Showbiz life and either divest or quash the creativity to a degree that the former productions are just a memory.
Exec moans, "Why don't people like our great new movie 'Finding Nemos Second Cousin Twice Removed 3D'? It had the most expensive graphics ever produced, I just don't understand these people".
In other words, nothing will change, and comcast will still provide the same level of customer support...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Slashdot and thousands of communities like it still exist today, and there is no sign that they are on the decline. Come to me when they start collapsing.
How?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why is that sad? Why is this "absolute insanity" Are you just railing against Microsoft? They aren't involved here? Also, why mod to Interesting??????
As for "In other words, if the price was lower, Microsoft could buy Disney without change ANYTHING in their business" - where does that come from. Having available cash like that does impact their business. It allows them to quickly move when an opportunity presents itself without worrying about financing. That is a huge business advantage versus every other company out there.
B O R I N G
They happen to be a run-of-the-mill cable company with a lock on the WashingtonDC-Philadelphia-Newark-NewYorkCity cooridor, the 4th largest TV viewing market in the USA, and 5th largest radio market. They are their own sports broadcast provider (Comcast Sports) with near-exclusive baseball, basketball & hockey coverage for the region (Normally you will only get a game on broadcast TV if the stadium is sold-out, Comcast gets them all the time).
As mentioned before, Comcast is approximately 1.5x the size of Disney, and are essentially a pure content distribution company. Disney under their umbrella would give them additional content to distribute... And think of all the movies that Disney has rights to, suddenly it would make the HBOs and Cinemaxes of the world a lot less powerful if Comcast could bring you Disney/Miramax/BuenaVista movies first. And look at what AOL did with TimeWarner, suddenly you had the Merry Melodies (Bugs Bunny et al) characters as part of their advertising campaigns == instant public mascot recognition. You better believe that Comcast would milk the Disney characters for commercials...
The biggest complaint last year is that ESPN sports content (who have a firm grip on broadcasting college sports nation-wide) was expensive... ESPN is a piece of Disney, so Comcast would own another valuable piece to the sports pie. The college NCAA tournaments in March are a month long advertising spree, and I'm sure Comcast would love to be a middle-man in that system.
Personally, I hate what Eisner has done to the Disney legacy, so anything to remove him from CEO would be a good thing in my opinion. Unfortunatly, a buy-out like this would only contain a Platinum Parachute (this guy already paid himself enough gold) that would make Eisner richer... something he hasn't deserved for a decade.
If Disney wants to, they could make Finding Nemo II all by themselves.
Well, they could try, anyway. It would suck as bad as every other Disney sequel though.
And how would the government collect that? 5% of the stock? No good... it wouldn't be many decades before the government would own all the businesses... and conversely, the government's actions would be dictated largely by the value of its holdings...
I'm unhappy enough that Disney can lobby so well. I don't want the President of the U.S. saying to himself "If we don't pass this anti-piracy bill, the government's stock will go down, and the government will not be able to fund healthcare."
To avoid that merger, I say let the corporations fuck like bunnies.
Steve and Bill have never recieved any options to buy MS shares (at least since Steve has been in upper management). I don't think they get any restricted stock grants. Both have had a policy to reduce their net worth's tie to Microsoft's stock price.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
The true sign of a paranoid individual:
- They're too afraid to stand by their opinions, so they use the mask of anonymity
- They refer to what the "government really wants"
- They think an uneducated population is something desirable, even though it would collapse an economy
- They reference some TV show like American Idol, which has nothing to do with the government because American Idol is produced by a TV studio that viewers support through ratings
Stop taking the Bill Hicks CDs so seriously--even he knew he was being facetious most of the time.
Comcast is mostly interested in the stuff they can show on their cable network thinks like ESPN, ABC, Disney and the affiliated channels. They're buying the company now because the value of the studios/themeparks is not adding much to the total value of the comapny. They can try to get the side businesses back on their feet, and cut their costs for channels which makes this a pretty good deal for them.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Why would all your servers magically be controlled by Hollywood? Are you going to wake up one day, and suddenly the whole Internet is a "controlled system by Hollywood?" What a ridiculous post (no wonder it got modded up...).
Scaremongers always say things like this without actually thinking it through practically. But it's been that way for centuries with you types. "Does anyone get the idea that maybe books will be used for nothing but pushed entertainment like some glorified street performer? Soon, books may be nothing more than a controlled system by merchants and the like."
When companies screw like bunnies, my guess is that it won't actually be other companies getting screwed, just their customers...
Oh jesus, you think the government wants us to be dumb so they can control us and you beleive there is a big secret club that meets and decides this shit. The government is unorganized, far too unorganized to pull off these conspiracy theories you idiots believe in.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you