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In the afternoon of June 12, Brian Roberts was sitting in a colleague's office on the 52nd floor of the Comcast Tower in downtown Philadelphia, eagerly awaiting news that would influence society for half a century. . For decades, the Roberts clan has gradually moved from the periphery of the media world to its burning heart: a series of premonitory telecom transactions and, later, the acquisition of NBCUniversal, a purchase that has everything given to Comcast. One could imagine it's a movie studio, a premium Big Four network, a thriving cable division, a trustworthy information company, and tips to control everything. At the dawn of the decade, the Philadelphia media giant competed with the most enlightened coastline companies, such as Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox, Jeff Bewkes' Time Warner, and Bob Iger's Disney.
On this sweet spring afternoon, Roberts had reason to believe that his company's fortune, despite its market capitalization of nearly $ 150 billion, was becoming more and more vulnerable. After all, all the up-and-coming media giants of the 90s and early years seemed pale in comparison to the newcomers on the west coast. Last year, Facebook and Amazon saw their stock valuations exceed $ 500 billion, a step that placed them alongside Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft, some of the world's richest organizations. This spring, Netflix has briefly become the most valuable media company in the world. The era of scale had been supplanted by an era of super-scale, a leitmotiv that was now frightening the establishment's players. "Ten years ago, companies like Viacom and Fox and Time Warner were considered giants of the entertainment industry and giants of American culture," a media official recently complained. long time. Now, "these are pawns consumed by much larger and more formidable companies that see entertainment as a vital cog."
To compete with new media, traditional media companies were combining like never before. And on June 12, Roberts and the rest of the media world were obsessed with the US's E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington, where Judge Richard Leon was rendering his verdict in the eight-month battle between AT & T and the Ministry of Justice. to buy Time Warner for $ 85 billion. Roberts knew that Leon's decision would set the tone for a whole series of future mergers, including Disney's intention to bite a huge piece of 21st Century Fox for $ 52.4 billion, an agreement that Comcast wanted to himself.
Roberts, who is 59 years old, has a great business way that denies a competitive ferocity. While waiting for the verdict, he was preparing to outbid about $ 12 billion. It was a typical show of the media sword, of course, but it also suggested a level of urgency. With 21st Century Fox on the table, not only would Roberts watch a competitor appear suddenly triumphant, but all future media acquisitions on his part were more likely to look like a cumulative badet of lower quality.
Shortly after four o'clock, as reporters ran out of the audience room to tweet that Leon had approved the case, Roberts saw the flash verdict on a screen granted to CNBC. He leapt out of his office's desk to snuggle against other Comcast executives in the hallway: it was the moment of the performance. The next morning, they boarded a train to New York where Comcast announced its unsolicited bid for the Fox movie studio, National Geographic Channel, FX, Hulu's 30% and a range of foreign broadcast badets, for 65 billions of dollars. 19659006] In the media sector, the past year has been something like the summer of '68 – a tumultuous and chaotic collision of personalities and businesses. It looked like the disappearance of a world order, where consumers depended on a cable, and the emergence of a new, where everything is accessible over the phone, and the traditional players must join forces to fight challengers survival. This dynamic explains why Iger will later increase Disney's offer to $ 71 billion, in a cash and stock offering. Even worldly media badysts predicted that the auction could climb up to $ 90 billion before Comcast's withdrawal on Thursday.
The Roberts-Iger clash and the AT & T-Time Warner saga (now on appeal by the DOJ) played in the midst of epic corporate convulsions: the battle between the Moonves and Shari Redstone over the fate of CBS and Viacom; The controversial Sinclair Broadcast Group plan to buy Tribune Media; $ 500 million from a billionaire doctor and a philanthropist to save the Los Angeles Times and consumption of Time Inc. by Meredith Corporation, followed by a garage sale Unfathomable for the most historic properties of Stalwart magazine. Meanwhile, Netflix and Amazon have each announced that they would spend billions on the original content. One could say that they managed in a few years to consolidate the influence that the Roberts family took five decades to achieve.
One of the defining characteristics of the media industry, however, is that many of the main players mainly family businesses, and therefore the logic of the case can be nuanced. June 21 Wall Street Journal portrayed Murdoch and Iger as related moguls, happy to work together, while throwing Roberts – who had been rebuffed by Disney when Comcast made a $ 54 billion surprise offer in 2004 As a snake in the grbad. "He's aggressive and he's focused and he's smart," someone who knows Roberts well-countered, "but he's not a shit." At the same time that Roberts was shooting for 21st Century Fox, Comcast also made an offer to acquire Sky, the European Pay TV provider. (His competitor, of course, 21st Century Fox.)
Perhaps most crucially, Murdoch found a way to save his entertainment portfolio while resolving, once and for all, the long speculative succession of his dynasty among the heirs. I'm always on the same page with each other regarding the company's strategy. Some people who are familiar with the Murdochs have said that Lachlan and James Murdoch, co-executive director and C.E.O., respectively, could have ended up dividing 21st Century Fox after the eldest Murdoch was ruled out. And it was better for the old mogul to do it himself, especially when the condition was ripe. Now, if everything goes as planned, Murdoch keeps the things that he cherishes the most – namely Fox News (which will be the profit center of a future company tentatively called "New Fox"), in addition to of his large-scale world newspaper. empire, now News Corp. Lachlan gets the crown – and with it the responsibility to set a course for his father's diminished pirate fleet – while James, increasingly sickened by the Fox News prime-time propagandist stench, leaves the nest and try something new, whatever it is. "The timing of the market is good, he is the ultimate pragmatist," said a shareholder who knows the Murdochs, referring to his patriarch. "It's a perfect solution, and one that's offset to the maximum." And it was clearly important to Murdoch. According to people with direct knowledge of the case, Murdoch did not buckle his children until about a month after his first conversation with Iger.
The benefit to Comcast is that it will not be hoarded by the debt needed to obtain these properties. The disadvantage, as Rich Richfield said, "The Wall Street Media Analyst," is that in terms of comparable acquisition targets, "it does not matter. There is no retreat. There is no plan B. "The remaining targets, according to a prominent media officer I spoke with, are disappointing – or, as he said," the lunch of a dog remains of media. Many good deals. Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, Viacom, CBS, Discovery, AMC, this is not the most appetizing menu. In summary, Axios recently launched the notion of a future Disney-Comcast merger.
The giants of technology, for their part, seem not threatened. "The joke about all those old white guys," notes another seasoned media officer, "is that they are fighting somehow on badets created by old white guys, and the technology is making fun of them." They're out of the way, it's not like they're quibbling about bits and pieces, they're not, like, forgotten badets, but they're not the future. "[19659011]
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