The New Media Giants

This video is appropriate for the first reading "The New Media Giants", because Comcast Cable is the largest cable corperation in the United States and I especially like this one because my dad is the former CFO and EVP of Comcast. He started working for Comcast in 1991 when he was the president of Storer Cable in Miami, (where he met my mom.) The owners and CEO of Comcast kept wanting him to go up to Philly to work at the headquarters and he didn't want to move because he liked Miami and it was cold up North. He tells me they offered him so much money for him at the time it was silly for him to say no. He has been in retirement since January 2006, and I have enjoyed spending time with him it is nice to have him around the house back home. The article reflects on Viacom and CBS's record-setting mergance worth 38 million dollars, which was done with the intent to maximize sales and put their company in the right place to outdue their competitors by making production more efficient. It mentions other trades and purchases such as when General Electric bought the company of the owners of NBC, and when Microsoft started to invest money in Comcast and other media companies. Every Christmas when i was younger, Fox Family Channel would send me and my brothers gifts with their logo such as CD Players, gameboys, etc. I remember about 10 years ago when my dad still worked for Comcast, he told me about this deal that his company was thinking about buying Disney. It never ended up happening, but in the years before he left, Comcast bought At&t and has owned them ever since. They now own lots of companies and venues such as the Wachovia center in Philly where the Flyers and Eagles play and I love going to games there :) I learned about synergy which is when different parts of the company work together to form a larger entity, and that National Amusements bought Viacom for 3.4 billion, but continued to call their company Viacom. I didn't really think about the power of Media Giants before this class, but now i can analyze things from a different perspective. There are two types of integration- vertical, and horizontal, and the difference is that horizontal involves sharing and dealing with different types of media products and vertical integration only deals with distribuiting, exhibiting, and selling a single kind of product. Before this article, i didn't realize that MTV had the most viewers out of all networks in the world, and that Nickelodeon provides programming to over 100 countries, in different languages-- wow, that's a lot!