Word: vivendi
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...earth these tools--movie studios, television networks, telephone companies, record labels, cable companies, Internet providers--and then stood back and waited for silly mortals to figure out how they all fit together. Last week's talk of a $35 billion purchase of Canada's Seagram by France's Vivendi represents the latest human attempt to make some of these pieces click into a seamless, revenue-generating new-economy Tinkertoy. The toy boys in this deal, Vivendi CEO Jean-Marie Messier, 43, and Seagram CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., 45, can't resist the urge to merge Vivendi's telephone company, Internet...
...real convergence in this deal would be the alliance of Universal's vast film and recorded music holdings with Vivendi's sprawling Internet, pay-TV and software-publishing properties. Classics from Universal's library of 24,000 TV episodes and more than 3,000 films, including such blockbusters as E.T. and Jurassic Park, could run on Vivendi's majority-controlled Canal Plus subscription-TV service, the Continent's largest. And Seagram's Universal music group, currently the biggest on earth, could deliver Limp Bizkit and Sting to millions of European households via Vivendi's 50%-controlled Vizzavi Internet portal. Such...
...head of this new media power, Vivendi's Messier, is a former civil servant who has undergone a new-economy makeover. When he took over the firm four years ago, it was primarily a water-and-waste management operator--who needs that kind of boring stuff in the new economy? Since then, he has been reconfiguring the company through a flurry of mergers and asset sales, shifting the product flow from water pipes to fat data pipes. After this deal goes through, he will probably spin off the remaining hydro assets to concentrate on whether or not he should green...
News of the talks follows hard on the heels of the mother of all such connections, the proposed $113 billion marriage of America Online and Time Warner, whose holdings include this magazine. And as in a Vivendi-Seagram deal, these hookups increasingly reach across borders. Last month Spain's Terra Networks, an Internet provider, agreed to pay $12.5 billion for the U.S. portal Lycos; the German media giant Bertelsmann will also be a partner...
...security, or at least of national pride. It's worse than McDonald's, Coke and Nike all rolled into one, because even the Europeans know that high-tech telecom is the future of the world economy, and they're determined that globalization not mean - sacre bleu! - Americanization. (Maybe when Vivendi finishes Seagram's and gets into Hollywood, the French, at least, will feel better...