US radio and advertising giant Clear Channel has accepted a deal to take slightly less in its sale to private equity firms, now valuing the company at $17.9 billion. Bain Capital Partners and Thomas H Lee Partners and a bank syndicate consisting of Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia, have now settled the legal actions over the acquisition which will see the share price go to $36.00 a share in cash,
CBS is branching out and has acquired technology web site CNET Networks in a deal valued at $1.8 billion including web sites News.com, ZDNet, GameSpot, TV.com and MP3.com. Broadcasters need to acquire more web properties to top up in internet advertising that which they are losing in TV ads.
The German monopoly commission is looking into how dominant cable operator Kabel Deutschland is writing its channel contracts. There are claims that the company insists that smaller thematic channels have to be exclusive to Kabel.
If the CBS move above and also a Comcast deal for $175 million to buy social networking Plaxo are anything to go by, there is building a landgrab of online advertising targets. Comcast is the biggest US cable operator an Plaxo is really a business networking site rather than for social networking.
Conax, the conditional access provider owned by Telenor has acquired Secustream Technologies which launched itself at IBC in 2007 with its SecuShow product, which assigns a series of completely random media keys to each second of digital content being streamed via PCs, over IPTV or on any other pay-per-view or on-demand system, claiming it was a completely new approach. We expect this means Conax will follow the trend to enable the offering of IPTV content on PCs shortly.
Nokia has completed the sale of its Identity Systems to Informatica which was announced a month or so ago. Identity Systems operates in enterprise identity resolution.
Last week the US Senate voted to cancel the recent FCC ruling which allowed media companies to own both a newspaper and a TV station in the same part of the US. It did this through the unusual step of a ‘resolution of disapproval,’ to the ruling made last December. This will leave a number of media companies having to sell off some element or other of media ownership, likely to include News Corp.
The deal by which Bell Canada is being acquired by Private equity groups is stumbling over tightening credit lines in Canada, caused by the losses piling up from the sub-prime mortgage scandal. The banks backing the deal, led by Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland are trying to revise their terms under which they lend money to the buying group, which includes the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan; Providence Equity Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity and Toronto-Dominion Bank. Legal actions may well fly if they cannot reach a new agreement soon. Someone described it to the New York Times as ‘Clear Channel ‘ The sequel.’ The likely outcome is that the deal will be re-priced downwards.
Video search engine company blinkx, which it is rumored is negotiating a sales of the company, posted a net loss of just $3.2 million for the six months to end-March, but on revenues of only $3.6 million. It said that it is ahead of plan in its move towards profitability. Video content hours indexed have tripled since last year and it is carrying 5 million searches for video each day.
Broadcom Chairman and Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Henry Samueli, and Senior Vice President and General Counsel, David Dull, have each taken leaves of absence as executive officers of Broadcom pending resolution of a civil complaint filed against them last week by the US SEC. The investigation relates to stock option granting practices. Samueli has also resigned from the Board and John Major, an independent director of the company will now serve as non-executive Chairman for the time being. The company as making no comments about the SEC investigation except to say that it relates to options issues five years ago. Last month Broadcom settled a case with the SEC over its investigation into stock option grant practices paying a civil penalty of $12 million.
Eight former executives from the AOL side of Time Warner are being charged by the SEC with inflating the company’s online ad revenues by over $1 billion between 2000-2002. Four of these executives have already agreed to settle civil charges by paying the SEC $8 million in fines while the other four are contesting the charges in court. The SEC says that revenue inflation was caused by giving money to advertisers to buy online adverts they otherwise could not afford.