Word: comcasts
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...convergence of television and computers got a big push last week when a couple of digital-era bosses, Microsoft king Bill Gates and Brian Roberts, president of Comcast Corp., agreed on a deal in which Microsoft will invest $1 billion for an 11.5% stake in the Philadelphia company, the nation's fourth largest cable operator, with 4.3 million subscribers. Gates and Roberts intend to provide what the other cable guys promised years ago and so far have been unable to deliver: a new set of digital services and a bigger pipeline to pump it through. For viewers that means more...
Gates was surprised to learn that such a statement would be cheap: $1 billion could buy about 11% of Comcast. (A similar slice of his company would cost $18 billion.) Roberts soon returned to Seattle with his investment banker Steven Rattner, the newly elevated deputy CEO of Lazard Freres in New York City. Like Roberts and Gates, Rattner is a low-key baby boomer with an intense interest in media and technology. On a Tuesday morning, four weeks after the dinner, Gates and Greg Maffei, Microsoft vice president for corporate development, went to Rattner's suite at the Woodmark Hotel...
...reality, there's not much left of the Comcast ranch to bet. Roberts and his father Ralph, 77, who own 7% of Comcast stock, have spent billions building up a collection of programming and telecom services. The list includes 57% of QVC (home shopping); a 68.8% piece of E! Entertainment (programming); the N.B.A.'s Philadelphia 76ers and the N.H.L.'s Flyers (more programming); a 20% stake in Teleport Communications Group (business telephone service); and a 15% position in Sprint Spectrum (cellular telephones...
...Comcast needs a bigger pipeline than conventional cable--called broadband in the industry--to handle that load, and Microsoft can help finance it. "By developing a broadband pipe, connecting it to a state-of-the-art chip and supplying the latest version of software, we will enhance both TV and the PC," says Roberts. To follow its own growth trajectory, Microsoft needs broadband to transmit its multimedia cornucopia of online news, entertainment and shopping. MS money now allows Comcast to accelerate construction of fiber-optic cable to expand high-speed Internet access, develop programs with Microsoft and reduce its debt...
REDMOND, Wash.: Aiming to take over your television screen as well as your desktop, , Bill Gates scooped up an 11.5 percent chunk of Comcast , the country's sixth largest cable operator. That gives him Comcast's stake in @Home Network , an online service that uses cable modems to provide rapid access to the Internet. TIME Business editor Bill Saporito?s view? ?Now Bill's got himself a delivery truck. Cable is such a capital-intensive industry because of the equipment. So for Comcast, which has a lot of debt, money is always welcome. It's not really a big deal...