Do too many Jeffs spoil the broth? Jeff Bewkes? Jeff Zucker? Jeff Immelt? Could they all wind up in the same executive suite?
Bewkes, of course, is the new CEO of Time-Warner. And Zucker runs NBC Universal. And Immelt runs General Electric, parent company of NBCU.
By almost accounts, Bewkes is a smartie, in the good sense. (By contrast, his predecessor, Dick Parsons, was described, in virtually every profile, as "diplomatic." Well, big deal. Nobody thought of Bill Gates as a charmer, but he was a pretty good CEO in his day.)
So now Bewkes has inherited a mess of a company in T-W. But don't take my word for it:
"If you have been an investor in Time Warner for a one-, two-, three-, five- or seven-year time frame, you have not made money," said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. "Therefore you have to look at the construction of the company and ask, 'Why is the company built like this?'"
The preceding is an excerpt from an interesting piece in the 12/25 edition of The International Herald Tribuneby Tim Arango, who is also, of course a media reporter for the IHT's parent, The New York Times. So maybe the story ran in the Times, too--it's harder and harder to tell what runs where in this new-media environment.
But in any case, Arango goes through some of the options available to Bewkes:
Sell the slow-growth Time Inc.; spin-off the cable unit; beef up the cable networks by acquiring Discovery Communications or the Scripps Networks; merge AOL with Yahoo or MSN to better compete with Google.
"Better compete with Google"? That's an interesting angle. And The Cable Gamer is certainly interested in that angle, but I'll save that for another time. For now, I am more interested in this possibility, also from Arango's piece:
Or, something even more radical: merge with NBC Universal, an idea that has been publicly floated.
Now TCG believes that this is not accurate: I am reliably informed that the plan is in the works for GE (Jeff Immelt) to spin off NBCU (Jeff Zucker) sometime soon after the 2008 presidential election. And I still think that that's the most likely scenario.
But of course, times change; so maybe there's a new plan afoot, to bring Time Warner into the fold with NBCU. GE could afford it: its market cap is around $370 billion, whereas T-W's is around $60 billion. But of course, a big reason why GE stock has been on the downslope for the past six years is because of investor fears about the viability of NBC and its media properties, including Cable Gamers CNBC and MSNBC.
So would Jeff Immelt really want to double his media bet? The Cable Gamer doesn't think so. But one never knows, does one?
I wonder what Jeff Bercovici thinks!
Update: "TW Tops in Media Flops"--that's the headline in The New York Post on Monday.
