14 Comments

Finance guy here. Traditionally, Wall Street likes cos. to spin off high-quality growth assets to “unlock” their value, if their perceived value is thought to be buried and less visible amid the spinning company’s larger market value. Assets whose value is growing usual end up publicly traded and assets whose value is stable or declining but are throwing off robust cash flow, i.e., Comcast’s program assets, often end up in the hands of private equity where growth expectations are minimal and leveraged returns can be substantial.

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A question not addressed: if NBC News and its reporters/correspondents, etc., are separated from MSNBC/SpinCo, does MSNBC hire its own reporters (highly unlikely) or does it become a purely talk/opinion channel?

Sounds like we're probably going to end up still "bundling"--only the method of delivery is changing, right? Now, we're "streaming."

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I love how short the Wall Street memories are! Cf. the history of AT&T/DiecTV/Dish. Not a happy story in anything like the long term, except for the consultants and investment bankers 😉

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Excellent, thx

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Ultimately it is a business decision, but not one that had to be announced shortly after the election. The timing makes it a political decision. MSNBC laughs at Trump and all their people are smart.

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The proverbial elephant in the room seems to be invisible. Why is this happening now? What just happened? This is a political move. Comcast, like Bezos, is kissing the ring of the new king.

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Unlikely. This has likely been in the works for some time and is somewhat in line with other re-structuring ComcastNBCU has been undergoing recently.

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Looks more like business. Without viewers it's hard to keep the lights turned on. The folks behind the microphone won't take a cut, although if one can believe what is being written some of them have gotten a recent gift.

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Ouch. You wrote “impacted.” Somewhere, an 80-year-old retired English teacher had an aneurysm.

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You're my kinda gal, Sharon.

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I live in terror of the a/e mistake, so I've expunged both from my vocabulary.

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But, Sonny, it's good to confront your fears.

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Courage to tell the truth is in such short supply that it is becoming extinct. At the very least an endangered virtue. Today there would be so few qualifiers that Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage if written today would amount to a brochure.

Sad that we had it all as a nation but allowed greed and vanity to steal our virtue. Freedom was seduced wooed and then we discarded it.

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It means nobody likes MSNBC anymore. And Joe / Mika are toxic. The faithful think they went to the dark side. And their new Maga friends just want to use them. In limbo. Advanced level of hell....

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