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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.
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!
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.
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").
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.