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Sticking out of AOL Time Warner's rather humdrum earnings report Wednesday was a very gaudy number: A one-time loss of $54 billion. It's the largest spill of red ink, dollar for dollar, in U.S. corporate history and nearly two-thirds of the company's current stock-market value. (It's also, as a lot of news outlets have noted, more than the annual GDP of Ecuador, but that's hardly relevant here.) All for something called "goodwill impairment...
...this year the rules have changed. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (yes, there actually standards in accounting) has decreed this year that companies must test their goodwill assets for "impairment" annually - and when they find some, they've got to fess up. And while AOL Time Warner's number may be the biggest (just topping JDS Uniphase's write-down last year of just over $50 billion), the media giant (and corporate overlord of this writer) isn't standing alone. A recent Bear Stearns study anticipates that some 500 companies are candidates for write-downs this year, with perhaps...
...many? Call it a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover. When AOL and Time Warner first decided to merge, the dot-com love affair was raging and the stock of the combined companies was worth $290 billion, mostly thanks to the price of AOL. By the time the stock-swap deal closed a year later, the bubble had burst, AOL was back on earth, and even though AOL had technically been the acquirer (thanks to that high stock price), the new AOL Time Warner suddenly had a relative lemon on its hands...
...moving cautiously ahead. CBS, the HD leader, records almost all its prime-time shows in high def, and ABC about half. NBC lags far behind. Entrepreneur Paul Allen has his own high-def channel, ASCN, based in Portland, Ore. HBO (owned by TIME's parent company AOL Time Warner) and Showtime provide high-def programming to satellite-TV subscribers...
...that HDNet is on satellite, Cuban is hoping to hawk his network to cable companies, which reach two-thirds of the nation's viewers. Cox Cable announced in March that it would start delivering high-def shows from the major networks. Comcast launched HDTV last November, while Time Warner Cable offers it in 42 markets, from New York City to Houston...