Richard Greenfieldwas an American publisher... (wikipedia)
We were impressed with the extent of margin improvement given flat adjusted revenues.
makes sense strategically, because it gives a cable component to what investors are viewing as the boring, unexciting growth side of the post-split company.
Mitigating the price increases of ESPN is not something Comcast has to do by acquiring Disney now. It's now something that's just happening,
One of the things they'd like to do is return more to shareholders, and ... a larger buyback makes a lot of sense at this point.
Online search is an area where advertisers are moving. Big media companies need to be there. They must have a more significant presence or they risk out losing on a big growth opportunity.
More than doubling the stock buyback will be encouraging to investors,
Nobody could have anticipated how much of a financial juggernaut ESPN would become.
If this is legal they've saved themselves a lot of capital expenditure. But whether this is something that can be rolled out system-wide legally, I honestly don't know.
Given how concerned investors are in the media sector, Viacom's ability to generate 5 percent revenue growth excluding the film business illustrates why we think there is significant underlying value in the assets.
From a Time Warner stock perspective, it's just great that everyone is going back and really having to examine what is AOL and why is everyone so interested in it.
Here is an asset that investors have very much given up on,
I'm still skeptical of the size of an individual download model, as (digital video recorder) technology is growing.
We continue to believe content is becoming more and more valuable as distribution outlets proliferate.
Whether you see it next week or the next couple of months, it's important that they do it.
We believe the Labor Day weekend is a significant weekend for local resident attendance, ... We believe the net impact of Charley and Frances implies that attendance will likely be down in Disney's fiscal fourth quarter.
(W)e are more interested in whether a broader industry trend is developing.
There are a lot of moving pieces right now. I think all of them bode well for Time Warner shares in the near term.
Trying to assess the earnings impact of a deal is tough since having no visibility makes it difficult to forecast. The investor base has no idea what the 2007, 2008 and 2009 original movies will be like.
The question remains whether the price/value relationship is going to bear fruit for Disney.
The public outcry following a large withhold vote in this age of corporate governance scrutiny may force the Disney board to act quickly after Wednesday's annual meeting.
Every media company should be thinking long and hard about whether search is just a two-horse race or if they could potentially create a third horse.
(Digital music) is a business that's supposedly at a very early stage of its development. When one of the biggest drivers of this story stalls out so early, it calls into question the overall industry business model.
the result should be sustained/accelerating growth in advertising revenues.
The strength of the AOL cash flow and billed subscribers were better than investors were expecting and an increase in full-year guidance is clearly a good sign.
Television was substantially weaker than expected, ... The aggregate strength of that growth rate in the weakest quarter for News Corp is a very positive indication of how undervalued the stock is at current levels.
Right now we don't know a lot. Both sides are talking and who knows what the art of negotiation is.
The move simply gives Malone a more liquid and tradable asset if he has normal voting rights. It's perfectly logical for Liberty to want voting rights in a company in which they own shares now that circumstances have changed.
A $US20 billion ($A27.09 billion) buyback is better than $US12 billion ($A16.25 billion), which is better than $US5 billion ($A6.77 billion), which is where we were a while ago.
They're going after Web properties that mirror the demographic of the viewer of 'The OC' ... (following) the activities of what those same consumers do online, ... buy.
It's encouraging. I don't think the business is completely out of the woods yet, but we are significantly better in 2006 than anyone expected.
It's at the margins for me. It just comes up as a trophy asset that I believe they should sell.
Don't confuse a recovery with growth. The question for investors is not how does Disney fare for this quarter. The question is next year -- and the growth rate is not sustainable.
It's ironic: A year ago people were questioning whether it would exist, and now five of the largest media tech companies in the world are speculated to be interested in buying a piece of it for multiple billion dollars.
It's very unclear whether consumers are going to be interested. It's still a very limited basket of channels.
If there's a strategy there, I don't see it yet.
Investors should increasingly focus on the aggregate unique users ... page views and time spent online across the AOL Web sites to judge the success or failure of AOL's new strategy,
Clearly the question is how to participate in young people's fascination with video games. But the jury is still out as to whether a company needs to own a video game business.
Clearly if cable is regaining market share without cutting prices, that is a positive,
But I can't imagine Time Warner wanting to sell their stake in Court TV to buy back shares, and even if they did, why would Time Warner care if the shares are voting or not.
If digital can help drive a movie's box office and DVD sales or help a TV show be successful, the actual digital revenues are secondary.
The gross profit dollars that AOL makes in narrow-band are as good as they will be in broadband, ... AOL's narrow-band business remains healthy, and there's a focus on both parts of the business and not on one versus the other.
