The STB business of Motorola has gone to Arris as they beat out Pace and others with a winning $2.35 billion bid. Arris is one of those billion dollar (in fact currently about $1.75 billion market cap) that no one not in its sector has ever heard of. They are so low profile the deal […]
Being a shareholder in Pace has sometimes been profitable – but mostly not – and it has rarely been dull. Now the Yorkshire-based STB maker is bidding for the Motorola STB business that Google would like to offload following its buy of the mobile business. For a company that was earlier this year on its […]
So, an academic study has suggested that the closure of Megaupload may have harmed legitimate box office takings for some movies. To some this kind of declaration is the media equivalent of being a climate change ‘denier’. I have said here before that the phalanx of content rights representation bodies – there are many of […]
There has been a consensus since the hapless George Entwistle was assisted onto his sword point a couple of weeks ago that the BBC should appoint an outsider as the new DG. All senior insiders were, to some extent or other, either tainted by the events that brought poor George down, or had no editorial […]
Larry Gerbrandt in Los Angeles raises the spectre of the unwelcome return of relative valuation Like a bad horror movie franchise, some valuation concepts seem to keep coming back for another sequel in hopes that this time they’ve got it right. I’m talking about the biggest financial sink-hole ever created: ‘relative valuation’. The technique rose […]
Remember Corporate Raiders? The very name sounds so 90s, doesn’t it? These swashbucklers of the corporate stock markets believed in a kind of financial engineering that, by the lights of the more modern and esoteric techniques of debt packaging and trading, seem both simple and benign. It didn’t always seem that way back then. The […]
As slip-ups go, hitting the button that let out Google’s quarterlies early was expensive – try 9 per cent of the value of one of the world’s most valuable companies. It was a printer’s mistake – how ironic an old world communicator should undermine such a cutting edge outfit. The market was spooked by the […]
It’s American election time again. A few elections ago, Bill Clinton, then running for his first term, pinned up a notice in campaign HQ that read: “It’s the Economy, stupid!” The sign was to remind all there that whatever the hue and cry of the election, ultimately voters would pick who they thought was competent […]
Content piracy is often cited as the biggest threat to pay-TV and, by extension, the creative industries. Stopping it is the job of content security technologists and law enforcement. Comparisons are sometimes drawn with the drug trade – indeed, rights organisations sometimes claim the same organised criminals are involved and that by infringing an owner’s […]
The top men at News Corporation have had their ‘qualitative bonuses’ cut by half because of the phone hacking scandal in the UK. The quantitative element remained intact, though, as the share price has risen 23 per cent. The businesses have certainly done well but, clearly, the main spur to the stock boost was the […]