F2Q10 Earnings Call

November 24, 2009; 11:00 am ET

TiVo was the first digital video recording (DVR) technology to allow users to record live television for viewing at a later time. The consequence of this is that recorded programs were often watched and ads were fast forwarded through. Of course, it did not take long for advertisers to realize that often they were paying for spots to reach fewer viewers. As DVRs were just hitting the scene early in the decade, many feared this would doom television’s most robust source of revenue, advertising. However, that fear has proven to be at least somewhat overblown as television advertising is still vital to the industry, and the recession has taken a bigger bite out of advertising budgets than the proliferation of DVRs.

F4Q09 Earnings Call

November 24, 2009 8:30 am ET

For example, if a Northlake client owned 500 shares of LMDIA they would now own 500 shares of DTV and 50 shares of LSTZA. Any fractional shares of LSTZA will be paid in cash.

By Andrew Willis

Astral Media Inc. (AAIAF.PK) makes no secret of its interest in acquiring the specialty television arm of CanWest Global Communications Corp. (CWGVF.PK) if the lucrative, 18-channel network comes up for sale.

Why was Josh Tyrangiel hired to be the new editor of BusinessWeek? One reason, the pundits agree, is that he successfully dragged Time — another weekly — onto the web. Ryan Chittum writes about “his eye-popping numbers at Time.com”, with pageviews rising from 400 million in 2006 to an estimated 1.8 billion this year, while Marion Maneker says that “he had tremendous success in building Time.com’s Web traffic over a few years”.

I’m an admirer of Tyrangiel too. But it would be depressing if Bloomberg’s brass hired him on the basis of his pageviews, because Time.com is an object lesson in how not to boost traffic. Reading Time.com is an exercise in frustration: the stories there are hugely painful to read. Barely-relevant links to other stories interrupt the flow on a regular basis; slideshows are everywhere; and in general it’s almost impossible to get through a whole story without being forced to visit multiple pages in doing so. Revealingly, no one’s talked much about Time.com’s uniques over the past few years, just its pageviews.

The Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

Here is why Bing (MSFT) paying Fox (NWS) to De-list from Google (GOOG) can be a significant first step and can work:

"We have plans for mobile, but no plans to charge for it. Our business model is advertising and marketing, as well as a nonprofit approach to investigative journalism," Huffington told me in a recent interview. "This is a time for reinventing journalism and advertising."

You can see the fault lines of this snaking through the comments on the City Paper piece, where one commenter talks about how the website “was doing nothing more than posting the print articles, and hosting some online chats,” while the “much-despised MSM reporters and editors were crammed together into an old, crappy space while actually doing the business of obtaining information and writing it.” Another talks about how “All this bla bla bla about presentation, aggregation and innovation will be all that’s left once there are no more reporters churning out actual stories.”

Here are some of the info that we are looking at:

A new research report was issued Wednesday by ConvergEx, which publishes a monthly “Jaywalk Concensus” report on thousands of individual equities, on shares of Sirius XM Radio (SIRI). ConvergEx's clients include asset managers, broker-dealers, corporations, financial intermediaries, hedge funds and retirement plan sponsors. Jaywalk is the independent equity research consultancy of ConvergEx.

Then we saw the news that they were going “help” with the Ticketmaster (TKTM) and Live Nation (LYV) deal in order to move it away from anti-trust concerns. (See news story above.) Fundamentally, the company looks to be healthy but at the time that we added the position, it had a inviting slope up as it was bouncing off support. That has changed since Monday of this week.

Q3 2009 Earnings Call

November 19, 2009; 10:00 am ET

There is more evidence that the NBC TV broadcast network could be divided up into one or more cable entities under Comcast’s (CMCSA) new ownership, which may be announced this week.

A high-level NBC Universal executive, speaking at the recent Monaco Media Forum, conceded that the idea of the peacock network going the way of cable “has been openly mentioned.”

Vivendi is in talks to unload its minority stake to the highest bidder. That could be NBCU co-owner General Electric (GE), a third party, or the public (in a stock offering). Vivendi has until 2012 to sell its stake during an annual window from Nov. 15 to Dec. 10. Sources close to the deal say cash-strapped GE would place $12 billion against the new NBCU to buy out Vivendi. GE would be a minority owner in NBCU with Comcast.